Mahiro cautiously peered out of his room. It was just after sunrise, and he knew what happened to the early worm. He would be safe once he reached the kitchen, where the dishwasher lay...
It was now occurring to him that he had asked Hasta to clear up the dishes last night, and he did not stay to make sure the alien knew how to work it. He opened the machine and looked inside.
Nope. The boy had tried to clean the dishes with glue. Which meant...
No clean forks. He had run out of them late last night.
No sooner had the thought struck him, than it was picked up by the one attuned to them. Nyarko was on the stairs with gleaming eyes.
"Give me your mind, your soul and your body" she said "and you can keep your mind and your soul."
Only one thing for it. Those violin lessons. He ran to one of the drawers in the sitting room, and just as Nyarko was pouncing his hand grabbed the tuning fork.
He hit her on the forehead. Not a sharp implement, but it vibrated at the right frequency to disrupt her dimensional veil, so that her human body partially melded with several of her other forms. She flickered across worlds. It would take her a minute to pull them all back in place.
"Sapphire!" she yelped.
That idea that such an effect could work was insane, but that was the thing about these beings. They were creatures of insanity, and if you could grasp some of their bizarre thinking it was your best defence against them. As the saying goes, set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, trip-wires, whirling knife blades driven by water power, broken glass, and scorpions to kill a mockingbird. Or something like that.
He returned to the kitchen. Hasta was coming down.
"Ohaiou. How is Kuuko-san?"
"I can't wake her up! She was up so late, she had this game, a visual novel she wanted to get through..."
Mahiro brought coffee to his lips. "Another of her porn games?"
"It had an English name. Crippled Chicks."
Mahiro brought coffee to the table surface. "Do... Do they know how offensive that title is?"
"I just know it has this school for the disabled somewhere near Inverness, and you pick a romance with one of the girls. She seemed to like the one without arms."
"Of course. Someone defenceless. Jesus, otaku culture in this country is depraved. I just hope it never gets an international release."
Nyarko listened intently and did something unusual. She thought about her next move.
"Say, Mahiro-kun. How about we leave that pervert to her unspeakable blasphemies and go on a gentle and quiet date?"
"A date..."
"That would be wonderful. You two could learn about each other and think about how you will raise my grandchildren."
"Mum! Don't just walk in from offscreen!"
"I'll make it the date you'll remember for the ages!"
"That's what I'm afraid of..." Mahiro thought. He was apprehensive, but it was better to encourage her to do this rather than assault him in bed. "I'll come. But on one condition. We go to a nearby restaurant. No trips across space."
"I know just the place!"
At the agreed hour, the doorbell rang and Nyarko was there. This was in itself a good sign. Mahiro had noticed that the aliens had some difficulty in following timekeeping on a world where time moved at its own regular pace.
She wore a long navy dress with simple patterns and a few decorations. The flow of the hem, the wave of the ribbons and the folding of each pleat was perfectly animated. Mahiro had dusted off a black two-piece suit that did not quite fit.
His instinctive reluctance to compliment gave way. "You look wonderful." He felt he needed to hedge his praise somehow. "I just hope there will be no nightgaunts ambushes."
"We don't have far to go at all. It's just round the corner!" She took his hand and tugged.
Hasta watched them go. "Take good care of Mahiro-kun!"
"What place did you pick? The nearest-"
"Right here."
On the pavement stood a thickly-built, windowless phone booth that had not been there before. Nyarko took him in. Mahiro was dismayed but not surprised to see it was much bigger inside.
"Where are you-"
"Hold on tight!" She headed to the control panel in the middle of the hemispherical chamber and flicked a lever.
Mahiro knew better than to argue and grabbed the nearest handhold. Soon he felt the whole contraption was changing locations, but somehow without moving. It was difficult on his stomach, but brief. He could feel things returning to normal; for a given value of "normal".
"Where have you taken me?!"
"Oh Mahiro. We haven't moved at all."
She opened the door. They were now in some sort of hangar area for what he supposed were spacecraft. But what a hangar. They were near one of the walls, but looking out two walls and the ceiling were dizzyingly distant, and only barely visible behind swirls of smoke. Then he realised it wasn't smoke, but thousands more of those spaceships flying in the upper levels.
He steadied himself against the booth, and looked at the other wall, that was some way away but did not hurt his eyes. "I need some perspective. How far away is that wall?"
"It is not a wall of the building. What you see there is the side of a parked General Systems Vehicle." said an approaching voice.
He turned away from the wall, that he could now see was moving, and towards the voice. A valet dressed in finery was walking towards them and holding a screen readout of some sort.
"We have a table for two ready."
"This is what's so great! You don't have to phone in to reserve before you go, you can just leave a time capsule after you come back! I just hope I remember to leave one, last time I forgot and the Tempolizia kept sending me notices-" Prang "Steel!"
The valet raised an eyebrow at the fork vibrating on Nyarko's forehead. "May I ask, sir, that you use only your own cutlery for such purposes? We do not wish to have other guests find their food with an aftertaste of Nyarlathotepan."
"Just tell me where we are!"
"In a very real sense, you are everywhere. This building stands on the last rocky remnants still floating free in space, while around us massive black holes are merging together. But more importantly, the universe itself has shrunk to a tiny hypersphere containing everything that has ever existed. Wherever you are from, you are still as near to it as our safety systems allow us to be."
"You said no travelling across space. So I thought we could go fifteen billions years into the future."
Mahiro sighed. "Well, we're here. Let's get away from these buzzing flyers."
"I will show both of you to your table. All security arrangements are in place, Miss Nyarlathotep."
"Security?" Mahiro asked.
"A routine matter for our guests. Maybe a little more demanding in this case."
They stepped onto a moving floor that enveloped them in a forcefield and carried them across the vast distances of the hangar into a set of corridors.
"Why is there a restaurant at the end of the universe?"
"For the view! Oh you haven't lived until you have seen the death of all things! Back in space kindergarten we would play smash-the-planet and make-a-supernova but this was the dream to end it all... I outgrew all that, of course."
The valet showed them to their table. The room around them was much smaller than the hangar, but still Mahiro could not tell how far off the walls fell. Above them was a transparent dome on which they could see a raging maelstrom of gaseous filaments swirling around a positively curved universe, finally falling to the black holes.
Mahiro took a look at the menu. Most of the dishes were incomprehensible.
Nyarko leaned over. "Avoid the gin and tonic. You never know what you'll get."
"They serve giant red-legged tripe spider? That's disgusting! I never want to taste any dish involving tripe!"
A waitress came to their table. "I present to you today's special" she said in a slightly terse voice.
Behind her walked a strange squat quadruped. "Would you like a slice of me? I've been eating only the best and most fattening cornfeed for weeks."
Nyarko looked over its flanks and rump, visibly salivating and talking about how best to cook it. Mahiro was not comfortable with this sort of culinary discussion, and it did not help that he recognised the same gaze Nyarko usually gave him. "All this flesh. So tender. So warm. I could just take it to bed..." Even the waitress looked on with dislike etched on her face. He drew her attention away from Nyarko and ordered a green salad.
The waiter came up to them. "I fear your dessert will be delayed. Another case of today's supplies being delivered to the birth of the universe by accident. While you wait, I invite you to attend our troupe's rendition of The Hydrogen Sonata in the telepathorium."
She led him to the room by hand. They sat beside each other and tried on the telepathy helmets. They were a tricky thing and Mahiro needed help with fitting the straps on. He realised he was letting her be closer than usual. This was a strange place where she gave a familiar presence, but not a scary one where he was too much on edge to take any comfort. So far.
And it was as they were fumbling with the electrodes that a man walked up to where they were seated. He was wearing a business pinstripe... no, a three-piece suit... no, an heavy frock coat... a lapel shirt and cargo trousers... it kept changing every time he tried to look at it, and his face wasn't any more definite.
"Nyarko-sama, your terrible and fitting doom will come about here and now as I have instigated it."
"Tsuinchi-san? I didn't expect you to come here."
"I did not travel here. I have lived to see the end of the universe, and I will soon die as the immaterium fades to nothingness. But I had to see my last plan come to fruition."
"Oh please. You make thousands of plans all the time and they just get in each other's way."
"This one has been in waiting unrivalled for countless eons, hatched the day you came to our space boarding school and made a fool of my sister."
"Ah, Suraaneshi-chan. I made art of her in a threesome with the Nightbringer and some Eldar god. Creeped her out. Why do you care?"
"I'm not doing this because I care for her or anything! All who rival our power must be destroyed! Taste your final demise, bitch!"
And with that Mahiro sensed through the helmet a rush of urgent thoughts going through the minds of everyone running the restaurant.
"The main surveillance has failed! There was a fault in a component built 8 billion years ago... Switching to backup- Backup has failed! A cat urinated on a wire 12 billion years ago... Get the emergency systems online- The switch is stuck because of a piece of gum 507 million years old! Tell the guards to scramble... no, someone put sleeping pills in their food four minutes ago."
Tsuinchi walked off. Nyarko was obviously worried.
"Why is the security so important? Are there muggers running amok?"
"Well, Mahiro... This is a popular place, and it receives guests from all of space-time..."
Mahiro sighed. "So everyone you've ever made into an enemy is here."
"We may be able to get out-" She hurried to the door but it was kicked open by the waitress who had taken their orders. She unfolded her tray into a strange blade and leapt upon Nyarko, who caught her in midair and threw her against a wall.
The waitress turned to Mahiro while Nyarko looked out the door. "Mahiro-san! Don't be let in by that treacherous Nyarlathotepan! She will harm you as she has done to all of us! We are here to make her answer for her crimes!" Despite himself, Mahiro found himself hesitating, and listening. "I represent a boy's love doujin circle-" He went running out the door after Nyarko.
Nyarko led him through corridors as long as street. Mahiro had no idea of the layout of the place, and even Nyarko seemed unsure about their direction. After some turns the crisply clean and carpeted corridors gave way to grimier, greyer and wider ones. This was the work area of the building. And behind them they could hear the pursuers.
It was while Nyarko was trying to get a fix on their position that they came into sight – a massive mob of which only a minority looked humanoid. They were not united, he now realised, much less disciplined. They elbowed each other out of the way and there were scuffles further back. Of course, any movement united only by dislike of something is bound to be fractious. But this lot had something else to fight about...
"Mahiro-chan! I want your autograph on my tentacle!"
Nyarko picked up a bucket and mop lying nearby – doubtless a vacuum bucket and cosmic mop or some such nonsense – and started beating back those in the lead. "Get your rotten hands off him! I'll be the one deflowering him!" Mahiro ran for the nearest door.
Another gargantuan room. Only this time he had no idea how far the walls went because all he could see was a a forest of machinery rising from the floor. They were the size of skyscrapers and were constantly moving with no evident joints, seemingly able to reshape themselves as needed.
Mahiro stood mesmerised for a moment then realised something was coming for him. A girl flying on some sort of wooden branch, with a majestic bird beside her. He dove for the nearest shelter inside some hollow in the machines and she sped by overhead.
Then came a strange sensation, as if his senses were trying to tell him something they could not express.
He stood up and looked around. No sign of the girl, or the door he came through. He was in a different part of the room, though still near the wall. This was time travel machinery, and it had as much respect for the coherence of space-time as the Internet had for common decency. He had fallen into one its eddies.
He had evaded pursuit, but also Nyarko. Would she ever find him? He was lost in both time and space, with no idea of how far away she was or how she had fared. He wished to be near her as never before.
He looked to the wall, and his gaze was caught by a flash of light. It came from a door within walking range. Best chance he had to escape these infernal devices.
He peered inside. It was musty and showed no sign of use for years. On either side were rows of what seemed like heavily armoured doors, but they were all open.
Inside each room were coffers and safes, with names on each one, but nothing stopped him as he walked among them. The security systems were down, he remembered. Then came the light again.
There was something special in that light. Though he only saw a faint reflection off the walls, it left his eyes with an afterglow of colours, but they were not the colours of ordinary matter. They were animate colours, as if the light were alive and calling out to all life. It was the sparkle of a rainbow in a waterfall but also the sunny green grass of a meadow in flower and the pale glow of sand in the moonlight. It drew him in.
He came to the saferooms where it lay on the floor between inert forcefield generators. It was a necklace, made of large translucent links that reflected the light coming from a fist-sized jewel set in the middle. He picked it up and found it was very light.
"Mahiro! I found you again! You got lost in the interstices!"
His heart leapt. "I thought I had lost you!" He ran towards her and was ready to embrace her.
"I saw a light and it seemed to be calling for me. Lead me here." She looked down at the necklace. "Hey, that's a lucky find!"
"Will it help us escape?"
"Who cares? It's pretty!" She a snatched it out of his hands and put it on. "Don't I look like the most beautiful sight a mortal ever-" Slap. "Lead!"
He heard a commotion outside. "We'll be trapped!"
They sped out of the saferooms and back among the time machines. Mahiro resolved to never leave her side. The mob was coming from all sides now.
Nyarko prepared her unspeakable bar thing, but was stopped by the jewel on the necklace. It was sending out its light in a beam before them. It shone on the base of the nearest column, and there they could see the circle of a portal forming. "Enter!" said a vaguely familiar voice.
There was nothing else to do. They followed the light, and jumped through the circle. After that came a moment of freefall during which the same light opened up the way through the fold of space-time they were in.
They landed in a clearing in an forest of strange trees. The soil was sandy, and all the plants around were old and withered, though not yet dead. The sky was overcast, with sunlight showing faintly from a faded star.
And in the clearing stood a slim but slightly hunched figure dressed in worn robes, with long white hair that was once golden, and a face etched with age that still showed an eagerness to please.
"Okaeri, Hasta."
He smiled at them. "I have waited long for you. I am not a tourist here at the end of the universe, I came here the long way."
"What is this place?"
"A solar system trapped in a small fold of space-time. It will be spared the crushing gravity of the last black holes, though nothing will survive alive, not even myself. I am a creature of this universe and I must die with it. But in the next one, it will return to normal space, and our hope is that it will leave some record of our own and help seed the elements of life anew. But one last artifact was missing."
He lifted the necklace off Nyarko's head, and even she did not try to stop him. "In this jewel is locked the light of the early stars that shone on the first worlds. I knew it was kept somewhere in vaults of the restaurant, but they had long since lost track of where. Once you two had it, and you were together, I could sense it and I guided you to here."
"Eh... can you also send us back to my time? With or without time travel, my mother will grow worried if I'm not back by morning."
"I can help, but the effort must come from you two as a couple." He started drawing shapes in the sand. "I just hope I haven't lost my memory for this sort of thing. Or my eyesight."
And he started singing, to which Mahiro and Nyarko danced.
An speur cho glas ri cuairtir a séideadh,
Cho lag ri coinneal a bha solas na gréine,
Fo dubhar na craobhan gun fás gun aois,
Air gainmheach garbh na freumhaichean staoin
Nian nan realtan le gaol mar uisge
A taomadh air balach beag briadha gun tuigse
Dhen an aisling miarbhaileach a thug e na ghreim
Bho cathair ghrúnnd na mara gu teampal air a' bheinn
Bho leabharaichean Sasainn Nuadh gu gaimichean ghaol,
Tromh seirbhis fhàin, searbhantan, agus teilibhisean an t-saoghal.
Fingers entwined as the song was flowing
A circle on the sand, the runes were glowing
The shadows gained as the day grew old
But the sky cleared up for a last ray so bold
It shone on the couple swallowed by the spell
As they were lifted up to the stars in swell.
Their bodies in glitter, by clouds caressed,
Nyarko's hand came to Mahiro's chest;
She drew out a fork in a burst of beams
That Mahiro snatched with haste unseen.
"Silver!" cursed she in pain from the spokes.
"Nice try" he said "You can look but not grope."
Onwards they were carried by forces in churn
And Nyarko feared they took a wrong turn...
The thing about travelling by magic is not that it can take you anywhere. "Anywhere" is a very small subset of where you can end up with magic.
"Hasta must have been more touched by age than he looked" commented Mahiro as they looked around.
The two had landed, a bit roughly, in a wide cobblestone street that stretched for a few hundred metres either way. On one side was a row of two-storey houses and shops. On the other...
Mahiro had taken it to be a dirt track running beside the road, but now he could see there was a small pier jutting into the mud with boats around it. The city was keeping up a pretence that this was a waterway. At least it smelled like one.
It was late in the evening, and only a few dozen people were walking about, though it was obvious the place was much busier during the day. And "people" was the best word to describe the variety of humanoid beings that formed the crowd, though most were human. They were dressed in much-worn, roughly-made clothes, and most showed health or hygiene problems. The two of them stuck out with their clean formal wear and cutesy character art, but everyone gave them the look of those who have seen stranger things and learned not to intrude on them.
Mahiro looked to her for some hint of what this was. Nyarko shrugged.
He collapsed onto the cobbles. "This date will never end!"
Someone tapped on his shoulder. "May I have a word with you?"
He looked up, and had to look further up before he saw a face. The man standing there had an aura of friendliness in his face and voice, but was also so tall, so muscled and so well outfitted with armour and weapons that he was making Nyarko feel small.
"I know everyone in this city, and I've never seen you two before. And you look lost. I feel it is my duty to help you however I can."
"Very kind of you, sir." Mahiro realised they were indeed in a separate world; he was speaking without any honorifics. "But I fear you can't do much for us."
"We get all sorts in this city, and rest assure I've worked on some strange cases before. First, I will need some identification."
"I'm Yasaka Mahiro, a high school student."
"I'm Nyarlathotep, elder goddess from the stars and the chaos that crawls up to you with a smile!"
"Well, I have to admit you are indeed quite unusual. Most children around here get some some tuition but few are still in school at the age of sixteen unless they win a scholarship. And you, milady, may have to register yourself with the High Priest, we're trying to keep tabs on the temples and we don't want gods running wild. Follow me, I'll try to arrange something."
He lead them down a maze of small lanes.
"Is it normal where you come from for girls in school to be goddesses?"
"It happens."
He lead them to an tavern, that Mahiro guessed was clean and well-maintained by local standards. They attracted some glances as the officer showed to them a table. Most patrons were wearing the same uniform and armour. They had a professional look to them, as in "I have all the same reasons to fight as you but on top of that I'm getting paid for it so I can hold out for longer".
He leaned towards Nyarko. "Better not drink anything, we can't risk-" He saw she was holding a half-empty mug and swaying gently. "Idiot! You're absent-minded enough when sober!"
The officer looked at the mug. "That's not alcohol. She's been drinking some very strong coffee. And I mean strong enough to raise mortals to uncanny perception. I don't know what it can do to gods."
Nyarko steadied herself and fixed her gaze on something beyond normal sight. "This world!" she shouted. "It runs on narrative causality! Stories are circling around all the time waiting to happen! We just have to fit ourselves into the right one!"
This got a slightly bemused look from all across the room. This wasn't because what she said was disbelieved, Mahiro realised; rather they found it odd to be so excited by what they considered to be a fact of daily life.
"I'm going to finish the story we have found ourselves in, of the lovers who faced trials and dangers and overcame them by their love to finally make it home!"
"That might work" said a blonde woman with a curious smell about her. "But fitting yourself into a story is as unreliable as asking for help from the gods. And far more dangerous, you never know which story it will be."
"But she is a god. Does that mean anything?"
"A god around here? Well that may be your way home. Our gods are fickle but when they put their minds to it they can achieve miracles."
"Can she qualify as one?" Mahiro gave her a frowning look. "Surely you need to do something worthy of divinity."
Nyarko met his gaze more knowingly than usual. "Or have a lover willing to suffer a world of hurt multiple times in your name. Whatever works."
"Hey, have you seen who gets worshipped in this neighbourhood alone? Some of the older houses have their own spirits. New gods are discovered every week, and one who manifests physically is a cut above most. And she has more combined eye surface than the chief of our pantheon."
Nyarko leapt up. "Power is mine!"
"If you have worshippers." said a middle-aged, middle-sized and middle-heavy man. "You need a temple, a priesthood, a congregation. Also some myths and holy rolls. Otherwise you're just another little spirit with dreams."
Nyarko hesitated. Then Mahiro stood up beside her and kissed her cheek.
"I believe in you."
Nyarko beamed up. In the sense that beams of light gathered around at her feet. She lifted up one arm towards the sky and put the other around Mahiro. He held on tight. The light around them danced and swirled. Everyone else stepped back and enjoyed the show.
"Wizards can't match up to gods when it comes to spectacle!"
"Showy, is what I call it."
The light enveloped them and the room faded from view. Except for a tall black figure at the back that Mahiro only noticed now though he had the feeling it had been around for a while. At that moment a voice came into his mind without so much as leaving a business card with his ears.
Of course, the two lovers who make it home is a perfectly fine story, old and loved. But then so is the one of the lovers who die together in the attempt. I wonder if you have relatives who might learn a needed lesson from your deaths?
Mahiro clung on and wished he had kept some potential plotline unresolved...
"Ah! Mahiro, Nyarko-san, so glad to see you back, it was getting late."
"We ran into some trouble."
"How was the date?"
"In a word: igirisu."
The couple made their way to the couch and sat down. They embraced and enjoyed some rest.
Hasta came up to them and lay down upon their laps. Mahiro patted him. "One day you'll help us come together as a couple."
Kuuko sat beside Nyarko and took her arm, and did not get rebutted. Shantak-kun climbed up onto the couch and lay down in their hair.
Yoriko put to play an old vinyl record in the hopes that it would play over the end credits. Someday she would be a grandmother. But not as long as the franchise made money. Probably in a distant epilogue at the end of an OVA. Until then she was fine with things advancing little.