Myuria was about to find out firsthand why the Well of the Fallen Angels had been given its name. Before she knew it, she was already standing up her ankles in the cursed black water.
The king of this domain was a tall aquatic bat-like monster called Amoebog. He sat in the deepest edge of the pit across from Myuria as if he were relaxing in a natural hot spring. His leathery, oil-soaked wings were stretched across the jagged rock formation behind his back.
Amoebog never rose from his comfortable spot in the water. His enormous muscular body was the same pitch-black color as the water around him. Myuria found it impossible to discern where the lower portions of his body ended once his broad abdomen disappeared under the surface of the pool. He must have been a giant parasite syphoning the well's magic for his own greed.
No, he must have been the well itself given physical form.
Myuria's allies were sprawled across the dry ground behind her. Edge was a human pincushion covered in shards of obsidian. Bacchus was scrap metal, his lifeless robotic body ravaged by a swarm of vicious swamp lizards. Reimi had been given the half-off deal. Her bow was lying on the ground beside her. Her legs were crumpled in the grass with the rear of her shorts perking up in the air. Everything else from the waist up was off somewhere being digested in a giant dragonfly's stomach.
Myuria was the only one still alive. Time was slowing down as she raised her staff toward Amoebog to cast one final attack. She was standing directly under a safe, protective, and woefully condemning tidal wave of mana.
Myuria screamed as the blanket of tar swept over her. The instant the abyssal tide splashed against her body, she could hear her own voice join the screams of thousands others. Consumed in murk, the struggling outline of her body melted, melted, and melted, like a candle withering away under the oppressive might of a nuclear-powered blow torch.
A tiny set of bubbles rose to the surface of the black pool, the only shred of proof Myuria had ever existed. The tar grew still a few seconds later.
Welch brushed aside her morning cup of carrot juice and pack of bubblegum. Her fingers diligently darted across the keyboard as she logged into her console and launched her dozens of monitoring windows with a hyperactive efficiency. She was making sure nothing upsetting had happened to the system since the previous shift. Everything on the astrological calendar looked clean so far.
She pleasantly gasped when she saw a blinking icon on her monitor. It was telling her something frisky was about to go down in the Sisko Galaxy. That was where she had implemented Threat Corrector ZWX09. Official classification: Amoebog.
AI characters shouldn't even know about that quadrant's existence. If anyone found their way there, it could only mean they were getting closer to discovering the true nature of their universe, and of the Fourth Dimension.
"Oh, girls," Welch chirped over her shoulder. "You might wanna see this!"
Instantly, three similarly-mannered Sphere employees scooched up behind Welch's work chair. There was Francine, a monster designer; Luise, an environment administrator; and Londra, a physics engine developer.
The four tech-savvy ladies anxiously watched the events unfold from Welch's diagnostic monitor.
Bjork Serling and his merry band of interplanetary adventurers were shocked by what they found. Landing on a black planet and hiking through a black jungle had led them to a pit filled with steaming black liquid and lined by foreboding black rocks.
The gently waving murk shimmered in ripples. As Bjork's friends cautiously drew closer, they realized the ripples appeared like scrambled digital numbers. They counted the sequence as it idly wafted up from the surface of the water.
0.
0.
1.
0.
The sequence seemed completely random, but it certainly didn't look like a natural occurrence.
The ground rumbled and liquid splashed as the rocks sinking into the pit began to move. Amoebog gave up his camouflage, revealing himself half-lounging in the tar. Chortling with the sound of an earthquake, he whisked a giant dripping hand through the air.
Flat illuminated panels appeared around Amoebog like digital Tarot cards. Each one showed a full-bodied portrait of a different female figure armed with her best weapons and poised for battle. There were thousands of them spinning in a ring through the air. They were mostly of the mage and rogue variety, each one clothed in the fashion of eras from the past, present, and future. The fabric of time itself was at Amoebog's mercy.
Welch's display constantly flashed with new output. On the left side of the screen, a randomizer was running. On the right side, there was a row of several empty storage cells.
"Oooh, I wonder who he's going to boot up this time." Welch anxiously rubbed her hands together in front of the monitor, stars twinkling in her eyes.
The randomizer blinked once. The first cell became locked.
Amoebog drew his hand back from his first choice. He gingerly tapped on another rotating portrait with his long pointed nail, and then another. He appeared to choosing whichever one tickled his fancy at a given moment. He did this six times total before the panels came to a stop.
The six highlighted portraits floated into Amoebog's hand while all the others disappeared. He snapped his fist shut, crushing the cards in his immense palm. All of the collected power focused into the end of his index digit. He slowly dipped his finger into the black bubbling pit and began to draw in a circle.
The vortex quickened, and the strange numbers illuminating the pool took a different form. The 1's clustered together, growing long and lean to form the general structure of the bodies. The 0's compressed and expanded, filling in all the finer details that were meant to be curved, bulbous, or round.
Six creations of blackness grew out of the churning surface of the spring. They were small, human-shaped things compared to Amoebog's massive presence, but they struck a chord of fear all of their own. Their appearances were like twisted parodies of the same six portraits that had been selected from the holographic menagerie. Friendly pink flesh had been replaced with oozing black murk. Weapons and clothing were in boldly short supply—not that they would fit very well on such an exotic assortment of creatures. The shape of their ears separated them by species. Most of them were humans, but one dark elven maiden was thrown into the mix. Their entire likenesses were crafted out of soft coal. Coal, like the ancient remnants of delicate flowers crushed under millions of years of unrelenting darkness.
They chanted together in a chorus of quiet, devilish giggling. Soft laughter and the constant dripping of water sliding off their glistening bodies were the only sounds they made. Their faces were comprised of a mouth, a small indication of a nose, and only a blank surface veiled in shadows and damp hair where their eyes should have been. Together they looked like a set of undressed mannequins that had artificially sprung to life.
They were "alive" in a chilling sense of the term. Their genes were so fragmented that they depended on Amoebog's black mana to fill in the blanks and approximate their forms. Their souls were even worse for wear: Devoured completely by the demon's ravenous spells, leaving nothing but his infused willpower to control their actions. All that remained were crude impressions of their original bodies and minds formed from the waves of a dark ether bank.
Shameless remnants of organic life. Trophies barely given physical substance. Despite their certain dark charms, the bodies of the six shades were humanoid only in suggestion and had lost all trace of that familiar mortal condition. Dark, grinning faces that lacked their own vision. Tiny muscles along the arms, legs, and neck that existed only for cosmetics and could never move on their own strength. Shoulders that remained eerily still—a lack of lungs meant a lack of breathing. Breasts that would never store a mother's nourishment. Firmly defined bottom cheeks with no functional purpose in between. Lifescans considered these figures closer to components of the demon's nebulous black biomass than actual sentient beings.
In their own separate times, these six figures had been courageous heroines who went by the names of Celine, Maria, Sophia, Myuria, Fiore, and Miki. Today, they were soulless goo zombies.
Two of them sloshed toward the intruding party with sanguine, cat-like movements. One had straight black hair that dangled down to her satin hips. The other shook the tar out of her long fluffy raven curls. Their fingers crackled with raw black magic as they advanced, lips giggling softly and chests heaving in round waves.
Another of the shadows raised her arms. Her hands molded into a shape resembling cannon bores made out of black iron. Darkness twinkled from the ends of her blasters.
One of the figures conjured an aura of bleak twilight around Amoebog. The effects of the spell trickled down through his children, bolstering the entire well's resistance to frost and fire.
The last two figures stationed themselves closely together as they began their ominous spellmaking. One of them, the elfish creature who had obviously risen from the remains of Myuria, combined her black arms into a twisted obelisk stave. The other slowly swayed her hands, drawing a ring of ooze around her shoulders like hovering black curtains.
For any sorceress whose very existence desecrated the laws of universe and was gifted a body sewn entirely out of the most potent black magic, mana conservation was a thing of the past.
Amoebog withdrew his claw from the churning basin. He nestled back against the edge of the basin with his massive arms folded behind his head. The six ghostly daughters who had been born from his magic spring would do all the fighting for him.
"What are all these subprocesses popping up?" Francine asked. "It's like your defense program is running copies of itself. But they all have their own registry signature."
"It's some of the biological properties I gave him when I was coding him," Welch said. "Instead of reproducing like most of the stuff in the Eternal Sphere, he unproduces other programs and adds them to his resource pool."
"'Unproduce'?" Londra scratched her chin at the alien term.
"It's a more scientific way of saying he squishes cute little bugs and dumps their little bug guts into one big heap. His sorting algorithms are the only thing holding them together right now," Welch said. "See this mess?"
Luise, Londra, and Francine curiously leaned over Welch's chair as she pointed to a scrambled grid of symbols and numbers in a corner of her display.
"These used to be individual NPC programs who thought they were the masters of the universe." Welch sarcastically widened her eyes and twiddled her fingers. "Now they're just a giant blob of junk data. These sluts wouldn't be able to render themselves as 2D sprites if they tried, but that's what you get for messing with my defense babies. Running them piece by piece through the old code nullifier takes 'em down to their simplest form: Bits and boobs."
Welch made a small sound that was a cross between a playful giggle and an impulsive snort.
"You're dismantling licensed assets and pasting the code together without administrative oversight. Isn't that a violation of the Autonomous Intelligence Preservation protocol?" Londra meticulously adjusted her glasses.
"Lighten up, Lonny," Welch rolled her eyes. "You can't really argue protocol if the original program doesn't exist anymore, can you?" A demented smirk crept across her lips as she tilted her head to the side.
"SphereCorp doesn't care," she passively added. "Amoebog mostly does his thing on system threats that get targeted for deletion anyway. There's no harm in transcoding fragments of expunged NPCs that weren't worth much to begin with. This is just a way of monitoring evolution in the Sphere. You know, for historical cataloging. And I have him configured so he only picks the pretty ones in one out of every ten million battle sequences."
"Are you sure you didn't just install this thing to build up your own personal collection?" Luise shot her co-worker a skeptical look.
"There's nothing wrong with having a hobby." Welch smiled ambiguously.
The monitor refreshed with a new diagnostic readout, causing Welch to whip her head back toward her screens. She clapped her palms together as she excitedly hopped in her seat.
"Ah, looks like he's almost finished with the clean-up procedure!"
There were no survivors. Bjork and his crew had been cut down by a merciless barrage of death rays and witchcraft. Smoke rose from their mangled remains. Even Nimue, the party's loyal white mage, was denied the opportunity of a slimy afterlife. The invaders were dead and their hideous infection could no longer spread. Containment achieved.
Amoebog lifted his arm from behind his head and effeminately flexed his digits through the air. It was time to put the toys away.
The six black figures quickly dissolved back into the oil well, surrendering their right to exist and rejoining their innumerable sisters in the muddled binary abyss. They would slumber together in this scrambled static form until the next time they happened to be drawn by the hand of fate.