Just as a heads up, don't take the science stuff too seriously.

I'm not someone who really knows stuff like quantum mechanics and wormholes and stuff, I just make up stuff that sounds at least decently plausible to me and then use that. So, if you're looking for a story that accurately portrays sci-fi stuff in an actual logical and correct way...this ain't it. I'll probably misuse words like crazy and make horrible leaps in scientific logic, but hey, at the end of the day it's a silly story about a human becoming a PA Commander and having adventures through the multiverse, if you came here for a serious story I'd question your logic =P

Chapter 2

After the destruction of the Rallus Commander, Skye honestly had no idea what was meant to happen next.

Normally in a game, it'd just mean starting a new match. Of course, that wasn't what happened. No end-game screen met her after she destroyed the Rallus Commander. She had her units all building and expanding, taking the entire Solar System over and covering it with her creations. An interesting and distinctly gamey mechanic she learned of was that metal deposits weren't actually able to run out. When she looked into exactly why, that gave her a headache.

According to the extractors themselves, which were similarly-equipped with AI as all her other stuff, they took in the metal from the ground, put it through a 'Harmonized Quantum Field Generator', which made little scientific sense to her, and that split the existence of the metal into two identical pieces but in different times. What that meant in layman's terms was the metal was extracted, then somehow had its literal existence fucked with so that the mined metal then existed in two places at once. There was the extracted metal, but there was also metal in the place that had been extracted.

That led her into experimenting with her fabricating arm. By controlling what was and was not fabricated, she was able to produce one of the Harmonized Quantum Field Generators for her own experimenting. She subsequently realized how bad of an idea that was, moved her primary chassis a long way away onto another planet using the teleport network that had been set up, and had a Colonel Proxy Commander constructed instead.

By focusing on the unit, she was able to directly control its movements and 'see' through its sensors, thus removing the danger of having her chassis blown up. She fiddled with the 'HQFG' a bit, eventually figuring out a way to miniaturize it. Then, she had a swarm of locusts created, the nanobots buzzing around hyperactively. Her hope was that she could somehow outfit the nanobots with HQFG's and literally swarm them into every metal deposit available, maximizing the amount of metal that could be produced.

Rather than doing that fiddly work herself though, she turned to the Colonel Proxy Commander. It, like all her other units, had autonomy to fulfil her orders. By ordering it to find a way to successfully integrate the Harmonized Quantum Field Generator into the nanobots and have them harvest metal, she caused the Colonel to stop stock-still as it ran simulations and models using all its processing power. Curious, she had another Colonel created, ordering it to assist the other Colonel.

The two AI pooled their processing power and kept working at the problem. Because her creations were able to network together, this meant they could work together to problem-solve. Skye then ordered thousands more Colonels to be created with the orders of assisting in integrating a HQFG into a nanite. With that order done, she turned her attention to the rest of the Solar System.

It was entirely covered with her creations. Every planet had Avengers orbiting it, whilst their surfaces were patrolled endlessly by swarms of bots, land vehicles and air vehicles, whilst the oceans on the planets that had them were teeming with various ships and submarines. But, for all she'd got, she had no way of leaving the system and finding new and interesting things. Looking outwards only left her knowing that to traverse the distance between her solar system and the nearest would take countless years unless she found a way to propel herself more efficiently. That didn't stop her from sending T2 Fabbers out in pretty much every direction with orders to establish contact if and when they reached a suitable planet for expansion.

Turning her attention to her blueprints, she idly considered the teleporter, building one and having it be assisted immediately by the nearest fabricators. It allowed for instant transportation between any two teleporters by essentially bending space so the two points were right next to each other, rather than their actual distance. But the problem was that a portal was only openable between two gateways, it needed that bridge. If she tried to open a teleporter with no destination gate, then to put it in simple terms, the bridge would collapse without another side for it to reach.

She set the order for another thousand Colonels to be built to work on the problem, amused at finding such a simple solution to her problems. If she couldn't figure out how to add a HQFG to a nanobot swarm, just get her AI to figure out the kinks. If she couldn't figure out a way to teleport out of system, the Colonels could do it. Maybe they could even figure out a way to upgrade her chassis...

That...was actually a very good idea. Immediately she ordered her bot factories to produce a full ten-thousand Colonels, who were ordered to find new and better ways to protect and upgrade her, whilst still retaining her size and shape. Better armour, stronger servos, improved sensor suite, an improved core, better weaponry and fabricator arm. There were plenty of things that could be done to upgrade her, and she now had the processing power, or rather her Colonels did, to figure it out for her. She idly wondered whether she could tell a group of Colonels to come up with things that needed solving or improving.

That led her to consider all the other components of her own chassis, and the discovery that she actually had an in-built matter source inside of herself which somehow replicated matter from nothing. She produced 20 metal a second from literally nothing. She could understand the energy, 2,000 energy being produced a second out of her core was a reasonable thing, but she produced metal out of nothing.

Slowing time down a little, she started some internal investigation, and learned that her core actually produced a lot more spare energy than just 2,000, but it was siphoned off and used to fuel her Matter Replicator. She assigned another ten-thousand Colonels to investigate the strange phenomena, quickly getting results from them as they actually built a second Osiris Commander chassis from nothing but nanites.

They took apart the chassis to properly identify the replicator and then they replicated the replicator, running experiments on it by siphoning power from the grid. As more power was supplied, the Matter Replicator took it in and used it to produce matter from seemingly nothing, up to an upper limit of 100 matter per second, which was deposited into the quantum storage that all the metal and energy was contained within.

The Colonels presented these findings less than a minute after she had assigned them their task, which was surprisingly quick, to which she then assigned half of them to finding a way to miniaturize it. The other half she then assigned to miniaturizing the Advanced Energy Plant. Her plan was that her Chassis would be improved with better armour and an improved replicator and weapon arm, as well as other upgrades, which included replacing her energy core and Matter Replicator with the upgraded versions.

Of course, first it would be tested on a recreated Osiris Commander Chassis to see whether it worked, all the kinks would be able to be worked out. When that was done, she would have her AI Core transferred from her current chassis to the upgraded one, only after it was confirmed to be fully functional and just lacking a core. If it went wrong, chances were she'd die, but she wanted any leg up she could get, and if she had to risk her existence to do it, she would do just that. When transferred, her old chassis would then undergo the same process, upgrading it and being kept as a spare. Maybe she could have a regular AI Core inputted and have her old chassis as a bodyguard.

As all of this was happening, the Colonels working on the Locusts came back with a consensus. They couldn't implant a HQFG into each nanobot, but if they worked in concert, the entire nanobot swarm could collectively hold a handful of HQFGs. That would mean that they could go to a metal deposit and extract the metal and replicate it, but only when in a swarm of over 20% cohesion. If they lacked more than 80% of the original swarm, there wouldn't be enough of them and the HQFGs wouldn't work, meaning the matter wouldn't be replicated and added to the quantum inventory of matter and energy.

She gave them the go-ahead for it, turning her attention to the Colonels who were working on the teleporter issue. She added a few thousand Colonels to the group when she received the response that they were working on a Quantum Cannon which would fire a pod containing a Colonel through a targetted section of reality, literally shooting a cannon into the fabric of space and setting it so that the pod would emerge from the other end descending towards a planet. They were mostly doing calculations and adjustments to the blueprint being cooked up, since quantum mechanics were not exactly a cakewalk.

The two groups working on the Matter Replicator and Advanced Energy Plant miniaturization weren't making much headway, so she set each group to be 100,000 colonels each, the act of which would normally be inconceivable. She had literally real-scale planets worth of resources, as well as a Gas Giant entirely covered in Jigs. She had absolutely no issue with resources. A lot of the Colonels were on the other planets, not even needing to be present on the same planet to share computational power.

With all these projects going on, Skye sped up her perception of time, waiting as she received various reports from the teams about things that they'd learned, changes to their plans, changes to those changes, and so on and so forth, as the various issues were looked at from an artificial point of view, meaning no human error and no real arguing about what should and should not stay.

If something was a good idea, the AI would all reach a consensus about that. If something wouldn't work, the AI would know this as a fact and would remove it or otherwise solve the problem. Since they could perfectly share information, any data discovered was shared with every Colonel in the research group and would collectively change their perspectives. Occasionally she split the groups into groups of their own and had them do isolated research, then merged them together, which several times revealed breakthroughs as the two or more separate lines of research meshed together again and had the AI note special reactions to certain tests.

But mostly, she just sat there staring up at the stars, wondering what she would find out there.

As she was slotted into the red-and-black Osiris chassis, Skye had to admit that her Colonels had outdone themselves.

When each Colonel group finished their projects and presented her with the finished project, she added them to the team working on upgrading her personal chassis. The chassis she was now being slotted into was the culmination of the work of hundreds of thousands of Colonel Proxy Commanders tirelessly trying to finish their projects. The team working on the HQFG's were the only team who didn't have a noteworthy contribution, mostly because they were utterly overshadowed by the work done on the Matter Replicator and Advanced Energy Plant teams.

They had managed to squeeze down both into tiny blocks that she could barely make out, even as magnified as her optics allowed. They worked wirelessly and internally, meaning she could literally just haul along a box stuffed full of them and they would endlessly produce energy and matter no matter where she went. What they'd done was repurpose her 'ears', making them hollow instead of the pure metal they were on her last chassis and filling them with the 'grainlets' of Matter Replicators and Advanced Energy Plants, which was fine by her since it hadn't changed the appearance.

Her right arm weapon had been replaced with several upgrades. She now had the weapons of each advanced turret, as well as a smaller version of the Holkins cannon mounted on her shoulder, and several miniature versions of the Galata Turret. Her left arm fabricator had been upgraded to be the same as the fabricator arm the Colonels used, except instead of just one nanite sprayer, she had eight of them. Thanks to the grainlets in her ears, she had more than plenty of metal and energy to fuel all eight as well as fire all of her weapons.

Her armour had been heavily upgraded as well, denser and lighter, able to shrug off Holkins impacts and the blasts of a group of SXX-1304 Laser Platforms with only a blackened surface to show for it. The servos in her arms, legs, neck and everywhere else were also a lot more resilient, stronger and quicker, which was estimated to increase her top speed significantly. Her internal sensor suite had been upgraded, having the equivalent of an Advanced Radar implanted as well as a repurposed nanite swarm courtesy of the team working on a HQFG swarm.

The nanites within her would work to repair any internal damage, then behind the plates on her forelegs were several pods which she would be able to activate to release swarms of repair nanites, who would fix any damage caused to her body. There were other pods interspersed elsewhere over the new chassis, ensuring that even if her front legs were blown off somehow, she would still have nanites ready to repair her. She also had an auditory system installed, which would allow her to speak if she needed to.

The most impressive combat-based upgrade actually came from the team working on the teleporter, and it came in the form of an AI core and a miniaturized and upgraded teleporter. The Colonels recognized that she was not quite like them, she didn't run the numbers and do endless calculations, she had regular decisions, which meant the defensive solution they came up with wasn't applicable for her.

Instead, they created an AI core which would use her sensory data to detect incoming projectiles. It would then selectively activate the teleporter, which would place a portal in the path of the incoming projectile while the other end would be behind her, teleporting the attack and making it so it couldn't hit her. For attacks that were proximity-based, it would simply open the portal further from her chassis, and in a pinch it could send the attack to any other portal gate, so even incredibly powerful attacks could simply be sent to another Solar System if needed.

This led them to also create a portal spike projectile, which acted as a fireable teleporter gate. She could fire this spike, and then teleport to it, even in mid-air if she so chose. The launcher for this was mounted in a small gun-pod on her left shoulder. All of these additions broke up the silhouette of her chassis a little, but as she was inserted and the chassis initialized for the first time, she found that she really didn't care.

Her optics came online, as did her sense of touch and her hearing. That was something that the Colonels were actually against her on. They wanted to remove the sense of touch since it could be used against her by causing significant damage and thus distracting her organic-style mind, but she wanted to be able to touch too much to allow it. Since they were her creations and, whilst AI, completely under her control and subservient to her, they didn't argue, merely telling her that they were opposed to that action, but that they would comply.

As her chassis finished starting up, she flexed her new arms, which had articulation in the middle and more closely resembled human arms, then took her first few steps, the new servos allowing her to move way faster than before. Running a short loop, she came to a stop beside her old chassis. She called off the planned upgrade, deciding instead that she would keep it as a spare and also as just a keepsake. It was her first chassis, and it was beautiful and deserved to be honoured. She had a replacement core inserted into it, and gave the AI now controlling it explicit orders to keep it safe, before turning her attention to the final item on her agenda.

The Colonels who were working on the tech to send a Colonel through a Quantum Cannon to another planet had finished their prototype and were now waiting for her order to launch it at their selected target. The Colonel would assess the situation, relay its report back to the Home System relying on the fact that their quantum communications meant any distance was basically zero, then if safe to do so it would build a teleporter.

In the time it had taken her to finally transition to her new chassis, they had already developed another variant of the Quantum Cannon, one that could fire larger and smaller material, only needing the pod with which the projectile would be loaded into to be changed. The cannon had an AI of its own because of course it did, which meant it would recognize the different projectiles, changing the energy levels and whatnot based on an uncountable number of variables. They just needed to build it, which was something they were waiting for permission for.

Rather than doing that though, she gave them the go-ahead to fire their chosen Colonel through the Quantum Cannon. In a sound quite a lot like the main cannon of a 40K Titan, the gun whirred, increasing in volume and pitch until it literally blasted a hole in reality itself. An instant later, the pod holding the Colonel was thrust through the hole in reality, which snapped shut behind it as quickly as it had appeared.

A few moments later, they got the initial report from the Colonel. It had landed, and the LZ was clear, no hostiles detected, with a Teleporter Gate under construction. As it finished, Skye reached out to the nearest Teleporter and felt for the gate the Colonel had made, linking them together. Rather than go through first, she directed a group of bots, land and air vehicles to go through, to scout out the area around their initial breach point. Once that was done, she sent fabricators through, who were ordered to set up defensive structures and factories.

Only when Anti-air, Anti-orbital and anti-ground had been established dod Skywe herself go through the portal, emerging on a world that wasn't very different to the worlds that she had been on in her Home System. Slightly disappointed, she assigned the orders that the world was to be covered in units just in case there was something they missed, while she headed back through the portal.

She re-assigned the Colonels, letting them work on what they wanted to. Immediately they began coming up with new ideas like resource pods, which would be filled with grainlets and then literally just buried underground to act as infinite resource pods, or nanite bombs, which would act as cluster bombs, spraying out smaller pods containing dozens of miniature Advanced Bot Factories to spew out countless Locusts. Skye let the Colonels do their theorizing and experimenting while she simply folded her legs up and stared at the sun her planet was orbiting.

It wasn't that she loved danger...well, she did like danger sometimes, but the fact that she had nothing to do pulled on her. Maybe there was some kind of quantum radar that her Colonels could make which would detect intelligent life anywhere in the galaxy so she could go and see them for herself. Her chassis was basically entirely self-sufficient and could even support hundreds of T2 factories on its own, plus it was incredibly durable. She could probably sit on a Manhattan and get it to explode under her and still be alright. Between the internal dampeners, the shock absorbers and the sheer armour that she had, it would probably just scratch the paint off of her, something that her nanites would fix up easily.

Then again, she was in Planetary Annihilation, so the only things she'd be likely to find would be hostile commanders.

A few real-time years passed before something interesting happened.

That something interesting was that a tear in reality had decided that the space she had been happily inhabiting with accelerated time activated offended it, and that to remedy this, it had to tear itself into pieces. Since she was in accelerated time, this happened in a very sudden and unexpected instant, and it took her a few seconds before she then flipped the proverbial switch and slowed time down to an insane degree, taking her new surroundings in.

Humans. She was completely surrounded by human beings. Her optics told her that she was in some kind of underground base, and from the guards, scientists and general lack of anyone who didn't look either very serious or very bored, she presumed she was in a military base of some kind. All of the tools looked pretty old-school though, and the guards weren't wearing any sort of modern or futuristic body-armour. Curious, she queried the AI in control of her teleporter shield what had happened while she was accelerated, and to which she got a report.

Apparently, she'd appeared in a field with grass everywhere, been noticed quickly somehow, then shipped off to this place, where they had been running experiments on her, like shooting at her, which the AI had promptly deflected behind her each time, trying to chisel pieces of her armour off and failing, and other tests. At the beginning, they tried to speak to her, but since she was still in accelerated time and gave no reaction, they stopped that after only a few attempts. It had been a week since she had appeared.

Reaching out, she realized with just a little bit of worry that she had absolutely no connection to anything else. Her quantum communications were supposed to work across basically any distance, meaning either she was somehow being blocked, highly unlikely, or she was in an entirely new dimension where her quantum communications were incapable of reaching their destination. Admittedly the second option wasn't likely either, but there weren't really many other possibilities, not if the Progenitors themselves weren't able to block quantum communications.

Deciding intelligence gathering was the best solution, she made the sound of clearing her throat, immediately causing the entire underground base to freeze. "Uhh, hello there. I come in peace? Hmm...you all look...oh I can't tell. Konichiwa? Bonjour? Uhh...Zdravstvuyte?" Skye turned her head to look around, making sure she wasn't going to accidentally crush someone, before shifting all of her legs and her arms, making sure they were all still fully operational.

As she did so, a rather stern-looking man marched into the room, flanked by several soldiers. Activating her nanites, they repaired the small amounts of damage done to her chassis, returning her to a perfect red and black. "You trespass on our soil. What country do you serve?" If she had eyelids, Skye would have been blinking. As it was, she merely stared down at the man for a moment.

"I serve myself. And I don't think being pulled through a literal tear in reality counts. Now, how about you answer this question of mine. Where the hell even am I?" As she spoke, she double-checked all her internal systems, making sure she was still fully operational in case she got into a fight. Sure, her AI assistant would protect her, but she had no idea whether they had something which would work on her that would just ignore the portals.

"So, you claim to not even know where you are. I wonder, a Rusviet spy perhaps? Maybe Tsar Nicholas is more suspicious than we expected. Or, more likely you are Nikola Tesla's most recent invention. Your camouflage technology lends credence to that theory. It matters not. You shall not be leaving this base alive after all. You suddenly show up disabled in the middle of a field almost directly above this hidden base, and expect me to believe that you aren't actually here for a reason?"

As the guy in front of her spoke, she contemplated her response. Rusviet sounded like Russian, especially with someone called Tsar Nicholas. Nikola Tesla was also completely inarguable, the chance of a genius inventor being someone not on Earth wasn't likely. This, paired with her previous experience, led her to the conclusion that this was another fictional Universe like Planetary Annihilation, just one she didn't recognize.

Didn't mean she had to play nicely. "I think I'll go with no." Saying that, she levelled the Holkins gun on her shoulder at him, blasting off a shot which completely disintegrated him, his escort, and those nearest before they could even react. She then sprayed nanites at the ground in front of her, creating an Advanced Laser Defense Tower which began blasting at every living being in the room, turning them into nothingless from the sheer energy behind each bolt.

Stepping forwards, she broke the restraints that were attached to her, marching forwards and giving her Holkins at anything her tower hadn't already engaged for whatever reason. As she was considerably taller than the humans, it meant there was only one door she could use, a large freight-loading door by the look of it. Spraying nanites at it from her fabricator, they followed her will and ate away at the metal. As it peeled away in large chunks, she directed her attention to the dead guards, spraying nanites at their equipment, bidding them to search through and find anything interesting.

Something she hadn't investigated much was the fact that her nanites were a lot more versatile than she gave credit for. By telling them to search and scan the enemy tech, she received a detailed report on it as well as a schematic to reconstruct it. Idly she sprayed nanites all across the room, having them search through it all while she exited the room and onto a large elevator, then spraying more nanites with orders to clear the entire base and search it all for anything useful.

Looking upwards, she made a mental note to make a bunch of Colonels who would make her a flight system, while she sprayed more nanites at the controls, setting them to activate the lift going upwards. After a few seconds they figured out which one needed activating and did so, sending the lift upwards. She skimmed the reports her nanites gave her as she ascended, nothing really noteworthy being present in the room, though they were spreading throughout the underground complex quickly, locating and scanning any tech they could find. As she reached the top of the shaft she was met with another set of heavy doors, which fell just as easily as the last.

Stepping outside, she blasted the guards that were stood outside aiming at her, looking around. The entrance was concealed with trees, the only evidence being the painted-over door remnants she could see and the guards stood there. Strolling away, she activated her fabricator arm, creating a T2 Air Factory. She then uploaded an order packet for expansion, a nifty idea that she had come up with.

She could compress a bunch of orders and send them to her units, or rather, she could use the pre-fabricated orders her Colonels had made when she mentioned it. The one she had just sent was telling the factory to expand itself, staying within the limits of their economy and to have its fabricators build resource pods which would be burrowed beneath the ground whenever the economy was about to go negative. That order would also be propagated through all the factories that were produced, thus ensuring an infinitely-expanding network.

Skye repeated the same with Land and Bot factories, both receiving their assigned packets of orders, then she sprayed an Advanced Radar into existence as well as some Flak Cannons, Galata Turrets, Holkins Guns and Advanced Laser Defense Towers. Her sensor suite had already been pinging her about millions of detected unidentified targets within range, which just begged for direct investigation.

It was then that she recalled something odd the man had said. Her camouflage technology? As far as she was aware her...oh. When she actually inquired about it, as it turned out all of her stuff was camouflaged in various ways, including in the visible spectrum. Since the surface of her chassis was a little bit scuffed up from whatever had transported her, that was probably the main reason why she was even found.

To her, that mainly meant she could go investigate the world without being super-obvious. Maybe when she got back to the Home System, or when she got a bunch of Colonels here, she could have them develop a human-sized 'infiltration model', that'd be fun. As she thought about it, she activated her fabricators and sprayed into existence a much smaller version of her own chassis, all the blueprints for it already being in her system, courtesy of the Colonels uploading all created projects for her own perusal.

Since it was being shrunk so much she had to get rid of the sensor suite and the teleportation module, as well as the Holkins and a few of the other weapons. Since the ears were also smaller there were far fewer grainlets, not that it mattered. When the nanites were done constructing the smaller chassis she took it over, directly controlling the machine and testing it by moving around, jumping and rolling, checking to see how displaced the ground got. She couldn't do it in her main chassis, it left craters in the ground just from her walking around after all. Between the size and the upgrades that made her chassis lighter, it only left marks if she put her weight all on two of her legs.

With her infiltration-model chassis jerry-rigged together, and her in control of it, she sent it skittering off towards the nearest and largest sign of contacts.