Ancient Legos
Chapter 11.6
Path to Reality
"A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…"
"BAAAAAH BAH BUH BUUUH BAAAH BUH BUH BUH BUUUH BUH BUUUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BAAAA-"
The ringing of the phone on the coffee table next to her fedora brought a scowl to the viewer's face. She paused the movie with her remote and exchanged her phone for the huge bucket of popcorn she was wholly intent on devouring. A deft movement brought the phone to her ear even as her other hand pressed the accept call button.
"This is my vacation," she flatly informed the caller.
"I know," the stern woman on the other end said. "The Senate is about to vote on whether that aid package we wanted to redirect should be delivered."
"Bitch I am the Senate," the movie viewer shot back.
The woman on the phone clearly wasn't amused. "Contessa, this is serious. Your prequel memes are not needed. The Path is. What can you give me?"
Contessa growled at her phone and collapsed back into her couch. She didn't need this crap right now. She had a new trilogy to catch up on. And then a saga of the infinite after that. Even more things to watch, and read. Memes to browse. Cats to adore. An entire Internet the likes of which Bet could only dream of lay at her very fingertips and she had merely scratched a semblance of the surface. "Purple is the smell of a wet taste of butterscotch," she informed her caller. "Happy now, Doctor?"
"No, just as you are not," Doctor Mother sighed. "Very well. Please call us if anything changes."
"If whatever it is stops interfering with me you'll be the first to know," she succinctly informed the Doctor. Left unsaid was what form that notification of her precognition would take, exactly.
"Enjoy your movies, or whatever you're doing to relax," was the reply.
"Relax or clench up, Legolas; there is no try."
Her phone disconnected from the call.
Contessa sighed and allowed her arm to drop. Her first vacation in such an extremely long time she quite literally couldn't remember the length of it, and shit was still happening on Bet.
Whatever. She was on Dis-Nie, she didn't need to worry about it. Not that she could really help anyways, what with her precognition going haywire, but it was the principle of the thing. What really annoyed her about her situation was that she had no idea what was causing her issues, just that it was in the future and violated casualty enough to prevent her engines from functioning then.
A not insignificant part of her was also excited at the prospect. How could she not be? She might be a lot more human than she used to be, but the search for a way to stop heat death was still important.
Still, that would have to wait. For once, she was having fun, and she couldn't do anything productive anyways.
She picked up the remote and unpaused the movie.
"-DA DA DA DA DAH DAH DUN DUN DUN DAAAAAH DAAAAH DUUUUUUUN DUUUUUN DUUUUUN DAAAAAAAAAH-"
"HOLY SHIT!" Contessa shrieked. She instinctively slammed her body to the ground in a clear attempt to dodge something coming at her head.
Then a searing heat that wasn't heat, some pain, and the rapid need to eject a part of herself in another reality washed over her, and she was able to ignore the strange and worried looks of the people, and store workers, in the Victoria's Secret she was browsing.
What the fuck was that?!
Contessa watched it fly by, mesmerized and also terrified. The pain it induced was immense, but also somewhat pleasurable due to what it was burning out of her.
Contessa blinked back into the focus of Dis-Nie, pushing her body off the ground. She brushed off her trench coat and glanced at the nice young woman who was about to try and help her.
"Sorry, thought I saw a bee," she offered by way of explanation. "I'm allergic."
The woman relaxed and sighed, smiling. "Right, sorry. I'll tell the manager. Do you, uh, need any help?"
Contessa smiled and turned around to grab something off the rack. "Yes actually. I was wondering, what exactly is this?" She held up the… garment, to the woman with a genuinely puzzled expression.
The woman blinked and grinned. "That is a teddy, and if you've never worn one you have got to try them. Here, I'll show you mine if you show me yours," she offered.
Contessa stared at her for a second before she figured out what exactly the woman was offering. Then a massive grin stole over her face and she almost began to skip towards the changing rooms.
The woman laughed, sounding like the tinkle of bells, and followed her.
Contessa was ecstatic. Vacation was good. And it was about to get even better.
The woman known as Contessa sighed and fell back onto her hotel room bed.
A day. One day. That's all it took to change the world. To change their destiny. The revelation of what the hell it was that had been blocking her precognition finally arrived, and then nothing was as it had been. Time had been changed. Earth Bet itself had been changed. It changed the world, or possibly worlds if echoes of it leaked into other Entity-locked realities.
It changed her.
And even though her encounter with Jane in Victoria's Secret which had continued back to her hotel room on Dis-Nie had been really, really good, she wasn't using the common human colloquium of world rocking to refer to that.
Her limits were gone. Entirely, totally gone. The ones she was made with, the ones added on over time, and even the emergency patch job that Eden had done just before she shut the bitch down.
Ripped and burned right off of her by whatever the hell it was that blazed past her on the way to Weldon's Shard.
When that great glowing… thing had emerged from some kind of travel method she'd never seen before in her reality she was terrified. Scared shitless. She thought she was going to die.
But then it didn't even look at her as it careened past her world, burning all the limitation modules she had in what seemed to be a complete accident.
It promptly slipped right out of her reality and slammed straight into what was on the other side. Namely, the Shard that was her multiversal next door neighbor.
Weldon's Shard.
Weldon Kenfield, someone she hadn't even known existed, had something happen to him that was so rare it literally defied her understanding of the universe itself, and it changed everything.
The moment that happened every Path she'd been running died. With her precognition unreliable she'd still been able to run event thread simulations based on her model of reality, but even those stopped working. Her data analysis engines cascade errored so hard she had to forcefully eject them for five hours while they cooled off.
Once she pieced herself together, had fun with Jane, and pulled her face off the floor of her hotel room a day later, she tried to run a new Path to killing Zion.
It didn't work. Her engines started to cascade error again, but thankfully that time she hadn't needed to eject them to terminate the systems.
Contessa realized then and there that something had changed. The universe wasn't the same as it had always been.
There was a new element. A new variable in the math.
And it was one she couldn't see.
Contessa breathed in and out, trying to relax. Even the memory of that time made her start to panic. Nothing close to the full body panic attack fueled spasms she'd been doing, decimating her world in the process, but still very nerve wracking.
The first thing she'd done after she managed to calm even a little bit was order a Door from Dis-Nie to her pleasure and relaxation reality and come up to this hotel room to sort out her thoughts.
Recapping what had happened to her was only slightly helping. Not even the TVs strewn across her personal penthouse were making much of a dent.
Maybe breathing exercises? She hadn't ever really needed them before, but she had heard of them. They were supposed to be very effective for humans. Maybe that was the side of her that was freaking out?
So Contesaa took off her coat and her fedora, laying them next to her on the bed, and pulled her feet up into the lotus position. She stretched out her arms, positioned her fingers, and finally closed her eyes.
Deep, slow, long breaths. In. Out. In… Out. In….. Out….. Like the wise Masters of the Force taught, she tried to let whatever passed for the 'universe' as a cleansing and calming agent in humans flow through her.
It was working. Sort of. Her mind stopped racing, going in circles endlessly trying to find a solution. She just… breathed.
Oh! she thought.
It worked so well, her body fell asleep!
She hadn't slept. Ever since the girl and the Shard became one, she'd not once gotten a single bit of actual physical rest. She had thought she didn't need it, her larger body could easily supply the matter her human body required to remain functional.
But maybe… the sense of peace and tranquility suffusing her very core was something she'd never felt before. Not as a Shard and not as a girl. The Shard because Victory Path had no concept of it, and the girl because of her native world and young age. Plus the constant work to save the world from Zion.
Contessa turned her attention to her next door neighbor, still shining with an ethereal white gold light that refused to register on her sensors but was nonetheless something she could still observe.
...Maybe there was more to the universe than what Shards knew. They were ancient. Not omniscient. And this thing had broken every law of temporal mechanics she knew even before it had arrived.
That admittance, that revelation, seemed to change something in her. There'd always been a slight information delay between her bodies. Nothing much, a couple nanoseconds here and there, but still detectable. It was the nature of her trans reality portal linked and synced self. If one of her was ever cut off from the other somehow, they would both diverge and suddenly Contessa would exist twice over. Whether they both chose to synchronize again would be up to them. She knew this and accepted it as a fact of reality, that even though she felt and believed herself to be one person she was actually two so synchronized it wasn't possible to notice except from the inside.
That... wasn't there anymore. For the first time Contessa was fully synchronized with herself. Honestly it didn't even feel like synchronization; it was more like she was simultaneously occupying both her bodies at the same time.
A flicker on the edge of her attention brought her focus back to her sleeping and dreaming human body.
She started, shocked.
Contessa was smiling. She even felt the emotion, she realized, but hadn't known exactly what it was. She was… happy.
And tiny flickers of gaseous, nonexistent light very similar to that surrounding her next door realty neighbor was appearing around her bodies.
Both of them.
The portal linking them was gone.
And suddenly… all her Paths started up again, fully capable of including the existence of her Soul in their calculations. Some of which didn't even seem to actually create the data so much as pull it into existence.
Contessa grinned wide in her sleep as the future unfolded ahead of her. She grieved for all the unneeded sacrifices, the deaths, and the destruction Cauldron had undertaken under her direction. Because of her.
She regretted her own actions the most of all. Not taking the shot at Manton as his projection murdered her brother… it was the hardest thing she ever had to do.
She felt tears begin to leak from her closed eyes. Hero, she mourned. Truly mourned, for the first time in her life.
And then she saw the truth of reality, peered beyond the current time in a way that wasn't entirely data based. She knew what had to be done.
She had to become, and make Cauldron into, the thing they only rarely mentioned the possibility of being when they were at their lowest.
Heroes.
And it was time to start cleaning up their messes.
Contessa stood up from her hotel room's bed and fetched her fedora without even a side glance. She slid it into her head even as she opened her mouth and said the magic words.
"Door me."
Reality sprung open in front of her. She strode through, head held high and the light of pride in her eyes and upon her set lips.
For once, she was proud of what she was about to do.
For once, she enjoyed the Path ahead.
For once, good was all she saw, and the possibilities were endless.
It was time to change the world.
"Swiggity Swooty Zion, I'ma comin for that golden booty."