Tuesday, Tyr's day, day of war.

Maria as war goddess. Although Tyr's a god. And Maria is far more Morrigan than Norse.

One would think that Fayt's gene would be a better fit for a war god, but what Fayt's gene does can't be called war. Maria fights wars, Fayt's power ends wars.

Tyr's story has an interesting situation that is not like a dog biting the hand that feeds it. No, not at all.

I'm going to be calling 'Azazer' Azazel throughout this fic. The US version changing the Creator's name to Luther I don't have a problem with. It's a nice name with fantastic symbolism for how I'm doing the character. Azazer, however, is a misspelling (l & r are the same letter in Japan). It sets my teeth on edge.

My vision of Azazel was really given life by the scene before the boss battle with him and the camp gay one in the bonus content. For one thing, I think his contempt towards the party wasn't because they were AI. He's that way towards almost everyone (but especially the dishonorable). While backstabbing is part of the game among conventional job hunters, jobs with security clearance requirements tend to go to the honorable out of sheer practicality (no one likes being blackmailed). In his worldview, those without jobs lack talent and ambition and most people with jobs are backstabbing idiots who do things like plot borderline illegal actions when they should know damn well that there are security cameras present. Very much a Knight In Sour Armor who holds to his principles not because he believes in justice, but because he has standards and refuses to sink to certain people's levels.

Due to an odd chain of events he saw Blair & Luther's sibling partnership in action, and he was very impressed that even though they'd come so far, they'd still back each other up instead of betrayal and so on ensuing as per SOP. So, his honor code caused him to stick his own neck out for them. He got promoted to head of department as thanks, which convinced him that he'd finally found some decent people worth protecting. Actually, due to the whole weirdness of that chain of events, Blair saw something that made her think that Azazel had a crush on Luther and his old-fashioned loyalty since then has just provided more evidence, since Blair thinks that loyalty to an employer is just as mythical as the tooth fairy. Thus, falling in love became the only logical explanation for Azazel risking his job. Cynicism and romanticism are an odd combo. I like considering how culture affects people.

Luther has been tactfully ignoring the matter ever since because good help is hard to find and it's a really bad idea to scorn your head of security when you're plotting something. Actually, while it was a reasonable assumption for Blair to make under the circumstances, Azazel not only isn't interested in either of them but he'd be really insulted if he ever found out they thought he might be. It's bad for a bodyguard to be personally attached, so if he did fall for either of them he'd have to resign immediately, horror of horrors.

In a different AU, I think this version might make a good mentor for Maria, like Luther is to Sophia and Blair would be for Fayt. They're both people who have seen too much to be cured of their misanthropy, and given Maria's penchant for underhanded tactics, she'd likely benefit from someone who put it in terms of, 'don't stoop to their level: you're better than that,' instead of, 'that's wrong.'


Summer vacation meant many things. Lighter course loads and more free time, or heavier course loads and less free time, depending. For once in this life, he actually had no classes, neither taking nor teaching, since the professorship started next semester.

This meant he was hanging out on the park deck of the Symbology building, drinking a chai latte that he'd gotten from the nearby cart (just to try it, he normally just went for coffee) and grimacing at the play of light and shadow among the cherry trees and the sparkling from the fountain.

None of the other people there noticed anything, but the problem jumped out at him. He'd created sapient life and he still couldn't fix three graphics problems. Damn photons: wave, particle, they should make up their minds! In a rational universe, they'd pay some attention to cause and effect instead of knowing optimal paths ahead of time, too, but he was trying to reproduce his own universe, and…

Time travel.

He could solve those graphics problems with time travel.

Frankly, the most impressive achievement of his own universe's god (or goddess: it certainly hadn't been a committee effort, or an effort at all) might indeed have been separating the light from the darkness. Life was generally quite happy to create itself, if you gave it a chance, but visible light was a contrary bitch that went out of its way to be difficult. Unless they'd just used a template.

Still, time travel. The idea of using time travel for anything had once been a pipe dream, and here he was thinking about using it to solve some minor graphics issues that only he and really picky art critics who had killed some time studying physics had ever noticed.

Actually, the fact no one had noticed them was sort of the problem, from the reading he'd done on the subject. Questions about why light did some of the really weird stuff it did had puzzled scientists, once, and led to the discoveries of a lot of truths about his universe. Sadly, they weren't very nice truths, but still. The phrase that heralded a breakthrough wasn't 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny…'

Of course, it wasn't like Dr. Leingod needed any more encouragement, much less puzzles to solve.

Still, thinking about time travel as just one more tool in his arsenal, one more function he could call up to solve a problem?

Man, it was awesome to be a god.

What other word was there for someone with this kind of power?

The sun was shining, the background music was actually pretty good (he'd have to look up the band later), cherry blossoms weren't falling in his drink for once because the gardening staff was sort of on strike (it was still hard to get his mind around the idea of strikes), the doctors had mentioned his name at the report night before last so they were doing the background checks to bump him up around three clearance levels, one of the sororities was doing something in the fountains that made for an even nicer view, he'd solved problems that had been bugging him for years, and Sophia had still been right when she'd walked up to him, holding a cup of juice, and said, "Is something wrong?"

Well, technically she'd asked it, but they both knew that it was just a rhetorical question. "Where's your dad?"

"He's still in his office." For Sophia, summer break meant summer school or 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day' almost every day. She took the question as a cue to sit down. "Uncle Robert told Fayt and me to come up here and run around in the fountain until we could sit still again." Judging from the fact that Sophia was sitting down calmly and Fayt was splashing around in the fountain, she'd just come to keep him company.

Dr. Leingod knew that he was up here, since Ashton was sort of on call at the moment in case something went wrong in the labs. "So you came to let me know that you were here and he was expecting me to keep an eye on you?"

"I came because you're really worried about something." She put her juice down on the table and looked at him earnestly. "You really need to make more friends."

He fiddled with one of the bracelets on his wrists and made sure she noticed that he was doing it.

"Is that ok?" Sophia wondered.

"It's fine. I know this building's security, this will cover everything." They could speak freely without having to worry about anyone or any camera hearing the real conversation. He sighed, tilting back his head. "I accidently created someone."

"Again?" Why was something he'd done before bothering him now?

"Not the same thing. I meant to create all of you. Well, I didn't know that you'd evolve actual sentience, but the whole process was very deliberate. I even annotated it out properly." Nowadays he was rarely nice enough to do that. It was the job of his employees to work to understand the system he created; it wasn't his job to waste time making it easy on them. "I was thinking about designing a character, and then I start looking for someone that would work as background for them," parent, an equivalent to modify, whatever, "And just me thinking about it, just… planning it out in my head, had made her come to life. That's not the only thing that I've imagined that…" The light.

It was perfect.

He banged his head back on the back of his chair. "That was the first time, and this won't be the last. I disabled that function when I couldn't find a bug and that didn't stop it! I only plugged the neural net in long enough that I could taste my drink! The next thing I know, pink elephants will be appearing in midair!" And going splat on the pavement dozens of stories below. What if that happened to people?

"Pink elephants?"

"You haven't heard that one? Try not to think of a pink elephant."

Sophia frowned, concentrating. After a second, she frowned harder. Then it went to outright pouting.

"Don't feel bad, it takes years of training. If it's even possible." He took a sip of his drink: he should finish it before anything managed to go wrong enough that he'd have to retcon it away. "Sophia, did you do anything last Sunday? Because that was the first time this happened."

"No." She shook her head. "I might not be very good at severing connections, so I can't stop data coming in, but I can control when I make or strengthen connections now." He'd helped her. "I wouldn't have done anything that made you make things without asking."

"It was worth a shot. At least I managed to narrow down that it started then. I can't figure it out. Unless I accidently put a timed Easter Egg somewhere." He mentally queried anything that had been set to activate on that day, either Sphere time or Earth time. Even though he used the signal of holding the third bracelet down while he framed the commands, nothing happened. He tried it again, without holding the bracelet. "Well, I can't access the search function mentally now. Maybe the problem resolved itself?"

He decided to test it by thinking of a pink elephant.

A stuffed toy appeared next to Sophia's drink. She blinked at it. For her?

Of course: what did he want with a pink elephant plushie?

"No, looks like it's still happening. Let's see. I can make people, gardenias and pink elephants, and set up time travel-based graphics functions, but I can't access the search function."

"Gardenias?"

"Roses have been done to death, they're too cliché," he informed her.

"I like roses."

"Well, Cassandra in the Applied Biology department likes gardenias."

Sophia perked up. "Are you finally making friends?"

"Well…" It was really emphasis on the benefits. Wait a minute. "What do you mean? Of course I have friends."

"There's Blair, and me, and Fayt, and our parents, and that's everyone. We're family. You don't have any friends, and that's sad," she informed him.

He blinked at her. Wait, what? He had tons of… acquaintances. With benefits or without. "You're right, again. Do you have any idea how weird it is to work with people who genuinely want me to get ahead? Sure, there are a few who are jealous, or want to get ahead enough they want to make other people look bad, but all this cooperation and people going the extra mile when it won't make them look good makes me paranoid."

"There's Mr. Azazel," she pointed out.

"He's not a friend." He was just a security officer who was capable of resisting temptation or curiosity and keeping his mouth shut when it came to small children who needed to be disguised and gotten in and out of the complex unnoticed so they could visit Gemity without anyone realizing that they or the man who didn't look anything like Luther had anything to do with Sphere Company. That took Blair levels of thickheaded determination to be an ethical person. "He's an employee."

"He likes you. He wants to help." There would be lots of people who wanted to help him, if he would tell them what he had planned instead of being so determined to be the red team, to play the bad guy so no one would take that position that wasn't playing around. If the government and stuff thought he would handle the situation, then they wouldn't.

Luther coughed. "You know how family and friendship aren't quite the same thing?" No, they were not having this conversation. "Maybe if I try making a search function right now instead of just querying the main one… That worked. I think you were right earlier. It is making things. No, there weren't any timed events." Hmm.

"Something that happened on Sunday?" She looked at him. "Someone connected to you. Not on Sunday, but… Someone changed you, and it wasn't me." She frowned.

"Can you follow the connection back?" He quickly swallowed the last of his drink and tossed it in the trash can.

"I can go to where they are."

"Time to be invisible." That took another bracelet.

"It's someone who's connected to me, too. It's one of the kinds of connection Fayt has, the way we're connected to you and the Sphere. It's been there for a long time."

The chains of fate. The one she'd followed to find him in his office that day, when they'd first tested the ability they'd crafted to go to him and kill him.

"Maria Traydor." He'd thought about coming in contact with that power, and it had come in contact with him. The way it was meant to.

"Are you ok?" He felt a small (invisible) hand on his arm.

"I'm not dead." Sophia was here, and that was just as good as Blair being there. The fact that he knew that this was because she'd tampered with his mind and caused there to be this bond between them remained, but he didn't hate her for it. She hadn't done it deliberately; she'd just wanted to know what had happened. Where this strange place was, what her daddy and Uncle Robert were doing to her. She'd needed someone to be there for her that day, when she'd been thrown out of her own universe accidently, and it had been him. It wasn't using him when Connection bound her as well, meant that she was here for him when he needed it.

"Your heart is beating really fast. Your other heart," she corrected that. His real one.

"Can you… thanks," he said, as he felt her concern and wish for him to calm down. He was too young for a heart attack, but there were things he'd built the Sphere's people to be without or resistant to. They were stronger, tougher, could handle more atmospheric variation…

If he were the jealous type he'd be saying they were lucky bastards.

"Her power is alteration. I thought that if I stayed away she wouldn't be able to use it on me, but I forgot the Eternal Sphere, didn't I? It's the Sphere that would have made Mirage, and she might be able to affect me through it, or did she just change it to be more amenable to my wishes to… create…" Creation.

"I need," he said slowly, "a means of testing changes to my character's genes."

No changes.

"My real genes."

No changes. But then, would they be changes?

He reactivated his thought-based command ability to tell the system to cease taking orders from him for the next thirty seconds.

He was still able to refill his drink. No wonder blocking the system's ability to read his thoughts hadn't helped. He hadn't given the system orders to make the rest of these things, he'd made them himself.

When the period was up, he logged out. Maria's ability was symbological. Yes, it was magic, but it was still based on the laws of symbology, of his Eternal Sphere. There had to be a record of what she'd done and when somewhere, in some form. It had to conform to the laws of symbology even if not the laws of physics.

By the pitiless and hungry darkness between the stars, by the entropy that drew the universe ever onwards towards eternal deathly sameness, what had she done?

The date… was in the last few months before the end, even though she'd targeted the in-universe day he'd made Mirage. The effects were sweeping through the Eternal Sphere, and even if he couldn't see changes in his own universe so easily, he could see what had to be changes caused by ripples that had swept through it and were coming back to affect the Sphere.

The time to the date of separation or destruction was shortening.

Whatever she'd done hadn't taken place in the last few months before the end, but in the last few days. He couldn't risk logging in to that time period.

Except he had about thirty-four hours, in terms of time lived, before the moment when she'd do whatever she was going to do would be obliterated by the retroactive changes, and then there would be no chance of undoing it. Sophia could connect, Fayt could destroy, but neither could alter. Neither could undo whatever she'd done. He needed to not just stop her but convince her, and a Maria of the final months would see him as the enemy. There was no way he could alter or control her mind or feelings: alteration was her forte.

It wasn't his 'Ashton Fords' avatar that was present where she was in that time, or even the avatar he used for public appearances as himself for in-game events or doing work with other staff: it was his actual physical body. She'd dragged it into the Eternal Sphere?

He stared at the prompt. How could he log in to his own body? It didn't work that way. He would be in it automatically, wouldn't he? The people of the Eternal Sphere might have minds that were separate from their bodies and could go on without them, but humans (his world's humans) were their bodies, their neurons, every spark and neurotransmitter.

He logged in to that specific moment anyway.


"Show us what you really are!"

"What have you done?" Was all he could say when she'd finished. There should have been memories in this head, his own head that would tell him what was going on, but there weren't. The only way that could be, the only reason they wouldn't retroactively form was if he wouldn't live long enough to form them. He'd had to study temporal mechanics because of all this, and even with the Sphere's help they still made his head hurt.

"What did you do to Ashton?" Fayt demanded: Luther didn't know whether he was asking him or Maria.

"You're one of us now. I made you what you would be if you were human." the leader of Quark told the Creator, trying to hide how much doing something of this magnitude had exhausted her. "If we die, you die." She'd seen the administrator account, before she'd altered it to strip him of his power.

What he would have been here? What he was here was… "You little idiot." But then again, wouldn't it be his fault that she wouldn't know any better? "You've ruined everything."

"Luther?" Sophia was there: she caught him as he fell.

"Sophia, go to my world, find Blair and… No, there's not enough time, this time won't exist long enough." She'd changed his body. Retroactively. "Maria changed me in the past as well; it must have taken effect the instant the Sphere was created this time. An AI killing and replacing, or worse, like the Borg, the human who created them, and using his position to hide them, all this time?" Retroactive. From the moment the Sphere had been turned on. Before he'd met Sophia. He would have panicked, or perhaps he wouldn't have noticed it when it happened, and gone in for a physical on schedule in all innocence. "There's no way I'd have lasted this long, I'm already dead, that's why I don't remember any of it, and they'd have killed all of you as well…" So many deadlines approaching as the temporal ripples spread: that might be a few months, but, "Thirty-four hours, thirty-four hours until Blair finds me unconscious," a do not disturb sign would only be obeyed for so long, once Blair got worried, and logging into his own body had made it his real one, abandoning the one left behind, "a hospital, and they'd find that my genes had been changed… Thirty-four hours until they pull the plug on the prototype Eternal Sphere." He coughed. This was a Federation starship, from the insignia: had 'Ashton' slipped, or had Maria checked everyone to make sure they weren't PCs? He coughed again. The blend of air Federation starships used was different from that of his Earth: it had to be killing his lungs. If his physical body really was here, with all its human frailties?

Sophia gasped, and grabbed his hand. Blood?

"You altered this to match, to be my true form, didn't you?" His true form if he'd been born in the Eternal Sphere, perhaps. In other words, without the gene therapy that had cured this little problem. Couple that with this sort of atmosphere?

The Eternal Sphere had gene therapy, but not on starships. It barely had radiation; it certainly didn't have a certain recessive mutation.

He couldn't breathe.

"Don't try to talk!" Sophia told him, setting him down carefully.

The healing spell bought a little time. "Don't bother, Sophia, I'll just keep getting worse again until she undoes this or this body dies." This was the Eternal Sphere, death was cheap. He could stick around as a ghost and try to convince them.

"Sophia, what's going on?" Fayt asked.

"He's been trying to help us, all this time. Maria, you have to help him!" Luther could see the symbols appear around Sophia. They rarely did anymore. She must be doing something very drastic.

Maria staggered, hit with a rush of knowledge and feelings. Unlike Luther, she didn't have the experience to tell the difference between her own feelings and Sophia's fear for him. Almost frantic, as though she was trying to save Cliff or Mirage, she moved next to him and raised her own power.

With Connection so strong here, its power flowing along the bonds between him and Sophia, Sophia and Maria, it was inevitable that it flowed into the other bonds.

Fayt Leingod. The fate of the line of god. All of these children had been shaped so that they would be his destiny, made to kill him. In fact, that was the only reason Sophia had been born, but the Eternal Sphere kept track of these things. It knew the past, present and future, it saw the symbols, the programs written in their genes and knew their purpose.

Dr. Leingod had done all this to ensure that they met him, hacked his own universe in a way that its creator himself still didn't fully understand, and that was why Sophia had appeared in his office. That was why Maria could do things like this to him, that was why he'd had to spend all this time becoming Fayt's friend.

Because otherwise, the young man would have killed him.

Or was obliterated a better word?

They were his fate. They had been made to be as powerful as him, with powers that matched his, countered them, could undermine them or bypass them and render him helpless to stop them.

"You… are Ashton?" Fayt could feel it now, through the power that had seized them all. The power of destruction tried to break free, to destroy the threat, the power so like that which it had been programmed to destroy, but he held it back. This was Sophia's power. He wasn't going to kill Sophia.

This was also his friend, who had encouraged him to learn what he was interested in, given him summer jobs helping with research, told him which classes were interesting and professors to avoid and so much else. Just as much an honorary uncle as Dr. Esteed.

"Yes." He owed him that.

"Then why all this?" Fayt asked, even though he could see, no, feel the time of destruction rushing towards them. No, of, of stopping, freezing that might have been eternal if it wouldn't be followed by utter annihilation.

"Very soon, this won't have happened. This can't happen." He could feel Maria altering the timeline so that it wouldn't just repeat once this reset it. The pain in his chest had already gone away, and that meant no discovery (not for years). "They have to think that I'm on the side of my own world instead of yours. The people where I'm from… We're so fragile, compared to you." There was too much to say in such a short time. "Will I remember this?"

"I'll make sure you do," Maria promised, focusing.

"What… gave me away?"

"You tried to alter that Executioner at the same time I was trying to weaken it. I thought you were trying to prevent me from destroying it." Now, she could feel that he would have been trying to stop it as well, reprogram it a little so they would survive finding out what they were up against.

"I should have realized I wouldn't be able to hide powering something down from you." What a stupid mistake!

"Just log out," Sophia told him, now that she could feel that he was alright. "You'll end up in the time in your world that you accessed us from."

"Wait, what will happen to us?" Fayt asked. He could feel that the specific end of everything he'd felt had gone away, but now there was something… murkier.

"Don't worry, Fayt. We'll go back to the way things were," Sophia assured him."He's always intended to tell you the truth when it was safe." She wiped his face clean, even though that would very shortly be pointless, and he felt her admin account log him out as time began to reshape itself once again.


It was Blair that found him lying exhausted in his 4d Workspace, but he was able to push away her concern after letting her watch him eat something and promising to watch his blood sugar.

Note to self, he wrote in his personal script, carefully avoiding the older symbols. Keep in mind that while I may possess godly powers, I am not the only one and the others are children and will be teenagers.

In other words, idiots.

He was fairly close to invincible in any sort of straight-up battle. After all, all it would take was materializing a few battleships or Executioners and he could conquer his own world. It would be a snap. However, this wasn't a battle. This was an attempt to avoid a battle that would sow fear. That would pit him against the people who could fight him, and it was fear of him that had made the Eternal Sphere create them in the first place. If he conquered them, if they knew what he was, they'd make more. They had the symbology.

Maria was just intelligent enough and she'd found out just enough that time to get herself in serious trouble.

He really should train her, like Sophia, but then what he really should do was not just kill her but destroy her, utterly. Cut her off from the afterlife and any chance at rebirth. Remove her from the playing field.

Except he couldn't do that. It wasn't a matter of ethics, what did ethics matter with trillions of lives at stake, but he couldn't.

That, he could blame Sophia for. Maria was part of her 'family,' the third of the trinity their parents had made. That was the bargain, after all, even if Sophia didn't think of it that way.

They wouldn't be able to bring themselves to kill him, and he wouldn't be able to kill them.

Ties that bound always went both ways. It was only fair, after all, and Sophia was one of those people who believed in fairness.

Just to be on the safe side, he still tested his genes.

The genes Dr. Leingod had designed for each of the three had been made incapable of interfering with or destroying each other, as a side effect of being protected against his power. (Although they could kill each other, as they'd been made to kill him.)

Maria might have made him human again, but by changing him into who he would be in her universe she had made another change, one she couldn't undo.

Who he was in her universe was the Creator.

He was human again. But he still carried the power of symbology in his genes.

The counterpart of destruction, as Fayt was intended to be his nemesis.

Creation.

At least he could keep it from showing up in the genes of his characters. That wouldn't look good on a Federation background check. Expellians might have natural symbols in their genes, but not ones like that.

This… was not good. Time to start avoiding hospitals. He might even have to resort to healing spells if it came down to it, even though he'd decided long ago that under no circumstances would he use anything from the Sphere to affect the real world. He wouldn't be the one to give it away.

Right now, though, he already was a walking giveaway that something was up.