Chapter Three: It's a Wonderful Timeline

And thusly, thereby the five of them ended up in Timeline Linear-Chi-9, which was fairly quiet at the moment if nothing else and did not make it a point to kick them out at the nearest opportunity. They settled in for a moment of relaxation to work down their nerves after the recent harrowing events and relax a bit, except for Kanraku who was not allowed to relax since he tended to get bored and blow up things and he wasn't really stressed out particularly anyway, or at least to any point that he let on at any rate.

"This place seems nice enough," Kalli said, sitting back and sipping a cup of lernade which wasn't really ice cold at the moment although it was colder than lukewarm and the ice in it had already mostly melted. "But what's our plan of action? How are we going to save the universe? Considering the universe has already been destroyed."

"Well, I've been thinking about that," Suzcecoz said. "The Nameless Ones may have an amazing ability to come back from death, but then so do I, so perhaps the solution is to soulfire them as things generally don't come back from soulfire or if they do they are greatly weakened. The only issue with that solution is the fact that powerful Soul Mages such as myself tend to be naturally resistant to soulfire and so it probably wouldn't work at all anyway or if it did it would require an enormous power source in order to produce a soulfire of sufficient magnitude to properly destroy their souls completely and I am not too certain where we could get such a power source aside from a massive soul web or the Zarniths from multiple timelines."

"So what's the plan?" Kalli said slowly and patiently listening to Suzy's incessant rambling and not really understanding a word of it. She picked absently at her salad with lettuce and bits of olives and tomatoes in the meantime, popping some of it into her mouth occasionally and musing over the flavor of the particular salad dressing used on the salad which was somewhat tangy but she couldn't really identify the flavor.

"I don't know yet," Suzy admitted. "I'll have to think on it a bit more. While the resources are certainly at our hands to manage it, it is still a bit of a longshot and I don't want to bank on it without further planning. Hopefully we'll have sufficient time to pull together a decent plan before they attempt to travel through time, and even if they did it's not like they will be very effective anyway due to entropy, and they won't be able to really follow us due to all the time-jumping we did between where we initially left and where we are currently at."

"Suzy," Kalli said. "Never say something like 'hopefully they won't' et cetera, because you know if you say it, it's going to happen."

"That's a fairly pessimistic view of the situation," Suzy said. "Logically, and statistically, it's just not going to happen all that easily, and if we take into account-"

"No," Kalli said. "Remember, the stupidest thing is always the thing that happens. Always. And you know as well as I do how likely the most unlikely of possibilities are to occur. Million in one chances happen nine times out of ten. Let's not rest our hopes on them not doing something. Instead, I'll assume they can and will do something eventually and it's just a matter of how and when, but consider that it could be at any moment."

Suzy frowned. "Then we would constantly have to be prepared to leave anywhere we're at on a moment's notice. We would never get a moment's sleep."

"Do any of us actually sleep anyway?" Kalli asked with a smirk.

"Well, you do have a point there, but maybe Theodore sleeps?"

"He's not all that important in the grand scheme of things anyway," Kalli said, rolling her eyes a bit as she thought about the strange gay teenage boy who had thrown himself in with them.

"That's another good point. Why is he even along, anyway? He's not actually helping or contributing anything, and he's not even from Linear-Alpha. It just seems a bit pointless to have him there at all," Suzy mused. "Although all things considered he might say something useful, but hell, he's not even much of a mage, he's just a Seeker, Illusionist, Water Mage."

"I am not even much of a mage, either, if you recall," Kalli said, smirking again.

"Right, you're just a mensch," Suzy said lightly. "But at least you have nifty cybernetic implants and you know how to use technology or at least fly that thing around and you're a great pilot and I doubt I could have flown the ship out of that rift like you did and not managed to get us all killed or destroyed or utterly lost in oblivion for the rest of eternity."

"Er," Kalli said. "Thanks. I think." She scratched her head momentarily attempting to determine if that was a compliment or not. Finally she decided that it was, shrugged a bit, and went back to picking at her salad. She wasn't particularly hungry at the moment, although her implants consumed a good deal of energy when she was using them and required an excessive supply of calories to keep them running she had not actually used them a lot lately especially the ones which were particularly draining like the anti-gravity generators implanted into her feet and the shield generator that was set into her sternum and would protect her to some extent from incoming energy blasts such as those of laser weapons and fast-moving objects like bullets.

Meanwhile, Kanraku was engaging in the passtime known as 'basketball' somewhere nearby. He had already accidentally broken the backboard twice as he had overestimated the amount of force that it could withstand by quite a lot, causing the ball to go flying off smashing through the board and soaring some distance away to come to rest in a hole in the ground about half a mile from the court. "Oops," he said sheepishly as he repaired the thing with magic and went to retrieve the ball. Upon returning with it, he proceeded to accidentally break the backboard again. "I'll be more careful, I promise," he said, but at least the ball hadn't landed out of sight this time as he had thrown it with considerably less force which was still enough to break the poor backboard, and repaired it again magically.

"How did you get so strong, weird alien thing?" said one of the young boys he was playing with. "Is it because you're a weird alien thing?"

"Well, yeah, that too," Kanraku said. "I had a lot of practice. With fighting, primarily. I have never played... basketball... before."

"So I see," said the boy with a smirk. "But can you get it in the hoop? Without breaking anything in the process this time?"

"I will certainly try," Kanraku said, throwing the ball much more gently this time with the attempt at getting it through the hoop without breaking anything. This time he managed to fail to break anything this time at any rate, but the ball hit the hoop and bounced off without going through it. "Damn," Kanraku said as he went to retrieve the ball.

"Much better," said the boy. "At least you didn't break anything. It takes practice. Here, try it again."

And Asura was back on the ship, making some minor adjustments and giving a good look-over to just what Suzcecoz did as he attempted to figure out what she had done and how she did it. Her knowledge of technomagic was far more advanced than his, but he had come a long way in a short period of time and could stand to gain something from examining her handiwork.

Nearby, his mind flayer guarded him stoically and silently, strongly discouraging anyone who had a mind to try to mess with the ship while the others were away. One of these days, he was going to create a mind flayer that would attack him and attempt to kill him or eat his brains or something, but until then, he had pretty good control over it. Most likely because the being was simply a bunch of raw mana formed into the shape of a mind flayer and not actually a real mind flayer, and it probably had no memory whatsoever as being anything other than Asura's loyal servant in the first place. Asura had been an ordinary mechanic from the world of Mothin, but when he had been summoned to the planet on which they found the Geneforge, he had gained the ability to shape living beings from the strange canisters that they found on that planet, an ability which those native to that planet referred to as Shaping. He had since learned that he was also capable of Shaping inanimate objects as well, without much difficulty, although the more complex the object was the more difficult it was to Shape, as one would logically tend to assume. He tended to have the most difficulty with high-tech items although his ability with that was slowly improving with practice.

All in all, it was a fairly relaxing stay in that particular timeline. Of course, that was not to last, as every peaceful intermission ends rather violently, since it is some sort of law to prevent people from getting bored and then throwing them into extremely random situations just to amuse themselves. Which is what Shazmar used to constantly do, and then he went and got bored of that and then made himself reborn as Kanraku and made sure nobody found out about it. Sort of, seeing as everyone kind of just knew it was him but without any solid proof or any memories to back it up, they couldn't beat the crap out of poor Kanraku for all the stupid shit Shazmar used to do to annoy people.

"You know," Suzcecoz finally said to Kalli. "We could probably very well find a timeline that was recently split off Linear-Alpha and just avert the impending end of the universe since we know it will happen. Certainly it wouldn't save the universe that was already destroyed but it would restore a universe very much like it, I suppose."

"And how might we accomplish that? Nobody was powerful enough to actually defeat the Nameless Ones on a permanent basis, even before they became overly powerful."

"Well, one possible option would be to find a way to collapse the bridge to the Karzan Galaxy, in much the same way that the bridge to the Warhammer universe was destroyed," Suzy proposed.

"Which would trap me in your universe forever," Kalli said with a smirk.

"Well, you could just cross over to your side first," Suzy said. "It's not really an ideal solution, and definitely not what I would have done with Warhammer, of course."

"No, naturally, you were all buddying up to Chaos already," Kalli said, rolling her eyes.

"Hey, it wasn't so bad, really," Suzy said, smirking at her.

"Not that most of you Elkandu had a lot of sanity to lose in the first place," Kalli said. "You're all a bunch of insane powerful centuries and millennia-old raving lunatics. Of course, some are worse than others, I suppose, but I have yet to meet a sane Elkandu."

Suzy stared off thoughtfully for a moment, trying to think of a sane Elkandu, and one could almost hear the gears in her head cranking along as she contemplated this. "Hmm... how about Amanda?"

"Not having met Amanda, I can't really judge, but for some reason I'm doubtful," Kalli replied.

"Yeah, probably. She was always a little odd compared to other Elkandu, particularly what with her thinking elves were so great, which might explain the proliferation of elves throughout the universe... At least she wasn't as bad as Aitur."

"What did Aitur do, anyway?" Kalli wondered. "I keep hearing that name but I don't think anyone ever actually explained why they say he was so bad."

"Well," Suzy said, leaning back and putting her hands behind her head casually. "It was primarily because he thought elves were the superior species and all 'lesser' races should be exterminated or forced into slavery. And not just elves, high elves. Wood elves were lesser than high elves, but still higher than humans and dwarves and stuff."

"Oh, so basically an elvish Hitler, right?" Kalli asked.

"Yeah, pretty much. Except he was an amazing hypocrite too, particularly considering the fact that at one point he was a metamorph too. It's kind of absurd to claim elves are the 'best' race when you can change form at will."

"But wouldn't your work on the Geneforge indicate that there may well be a 'superior' race?" Kalli inquired.

"Eh, not particularly," Suzy said. "And even if there is, it sure as hell isn't elves. We combined aspects from dozens of different races and species, and some mutant individuals of which there was only one extant specimen. And even so, many of the advantages were counterbalanced by heavy disadvantages. For instance, have you seen how much Kanraku eats?"

"How could I not?" Kalli said with a smirk.

"Yeah. It's because of matter-energy conversion, a great deal of matter is required to maintain the normal power output he puts off."

"Well, yeah, I know about that because my cybernetic implants work the same way... but I wouldn't really call it much of a disadvantage, especially not when you've got your replicators around."

"But what if you didn't have a replicator around? The energy consumed is enormous."

"Well, I've sometimes had difficulty with powering my implants, but in such cases I generally just turn them off or don't use them," Kalli said with a shrug. "But I suppose if that option isn't available that might be an issue."

"The Cybions certainly had a firm grasp of cybernetics and genetics, and the Karzans in general quite an advanced knowledge of gravity manipulation," Suzy said appraisingly. "But I'm surprised that you had not further developed magic considering the weak veil in the Karzan Galaxy, which should have made it a good deal easier to use than in most places. The psionics I observed was all fine and good, but there was a good deal of potential for far more than telepathy and telekinetics."

Kalli shrugged. "Some other abilities showed up occasionally, but most telepaths couldn't throw fireballs and lightning bolts around with a wave of their hands, to be sure."

Kalli absently thought back to one of her classes, in which the class was shown violent and bloody holovids to desensitize them to it so that they would not freak out in an actual combat situation. She had to question whether or not it actually worked, as it was difficult to judge on herself since she generally didn't get freaked out at much of anything even before that, perhaps because of her inability to experience fear due to her genetic manipulation that her mother had done to her before she was born. She had lost touch with most of the people she had known during her childhood when she became one of the Empress's Own and began working for the Karzan Empire.

"Hello there!" said a deranged voice ominously approaching them.