There were times in Pom-Pom's life where they couldn't help but wish Akivili had been a bit less adventurous.
It had been a rude shock when their friendship had started, how often the divine manifestation of the Trailblaze would throw all caution to the wind and just do something. In Amber Eras long since past, when Pom-Pom had been young and not aged by their millennia of loneliness, nothing could turn their fur gray faster than Akivili's latest whims.
Crashing the Astral Express into their problems was a common occurrence. It would usually cost some paint, along with the ire of whatever planet needed to endure the collision, but the train would never break. Nothing was as sturdy as the spirit of the Trailblaze, and nothing short of an Emanator could so much as shake that divine providence on their tracks.
Until something had, and Akivili was no more.
Perhaps dead, perhaps in hiding. Perhaps all along it had been a prank, and THEY had simply lost their scale for timing. Either way, there was little choice for Pom-Pom and the others.
They'd carried on. They had to. The Trailblazers were more than a crew, they were a family. The conductor was synonymous with the train, and the paths still existed even if their Aeon had fallen. Not all of them, though.
All it had taken was one wrong turn, a joint mistake made by the conductor and the navigator of the time, and the train had derailed. Perhaps it was just incredibly poor luck. Perhaps it was a joke so cruel that only the Elation could have thought it up. It was their perfect end, a fate so fitting that HooH THEMselves probably had a hand in bringing it about.
The train had derailed, and with it, so too had the main faction of the Trailblaze.
The years had been long, and empty. Eras leaving the Nameless behind until they were nothing more than a legend. Carriages that had once been so full of life were little more than shells, hidden away from the light of the stars as whatever planet they'd ended up on grew around them.
Sometimes it was green. Sometimes white. Oftentimes it was dark, and on a few memorable occasions, the world outside had been swamped with bright red and yellow infernos. The memories blurred, drawn out yet compressed. Maybe that was how the Aeons perceived time. Maybe Pom-Pom had been closer to following in Akivili's footsteps than they'd realised.
Once Himeko had gotten them back into the stars, everything was different. Where once the Trailblaze had criss-crossed the universe, now the tracks more resembled frayed rope. The main paths had mostly survived, but anything that hadn't managed to sustain itself off passive travel was almost entirely gone. For all their faults, the Interastral Peace Corporation were potentially the only ones keeping those rails alive.
The galaxy had changed. In some ways, irreversibly. Akivili had made friends everywhere THEY went, but THEY'D also found their fair share of enemies. Enemies that were either no longer around, or so deeply entrenched in their anonymity that they were effectively dead anyway. Apparently, you didn't survive long in a universe where you managed to make an enemy of the eternally affable Trailblaze, of all Aeons.
With no motivation to think otherwise, to the universe, the Nameless were heroes. A reputation they had every right to, in Pom-Pom's humble opinion, even taking into account the moments where Akivili would crush some poor soul with the Express. Without the Star Rails, interplanetary cooperation would have been impossible. Outside of the shockingly few worlds that had the resources necessary for galactic travel, most places would have been stuck in the stone age.
So of course, it had to be the Nameless that would be tasked with seeking out the Stellarons. Nanook's little gifts to numerous worlds, that hampered their already severely hamstrung routes. If that Aeon ever deigned to show THEIR shiny ass up to the parlour car, Pom-Pom would show THEM some real Destruction.
The pit stops became random. Akivili's thirst to see the universe had come back to bite THEIR faction, and would likely continue to do so until SOMEONE with power got a little more annoyed at the Aeon of Upstarts. The rails, while diminished, still connected between basically all the known planets in the charted universe.
Including the ones that Pom-Pom could very much live without.
Such as Punklorde, for example.
Some civilisations were more taxing than others. There had been governing bodies in the past that had attempted to bribe, threaten, or even destroy the Astral Express. Pom-Pom could vividly remember the time Honnorth XI decided to launch a full scale invasion after the prince had elected to become a Nameless, and even that felt more welcoming than just flying past Punklorde.
For such nonsensical people, their reasoning was surprisingly simple. If all the universe was a game, then the Aeons were the final bosses. Therefore, the construction of an Aeon, said to be powered by the heart of that Aeon, was a prime target. Until Mafioso had decided he liked the feel of the train and joined it officially as part of their 512th crew iteration, Pom-Pom would be cleaning out the archives of prank code for months. Even thousands of Trailblaze years after his death, His self-updating algorithms were still keeping them safe from cyber attacks.
They were always pushed to their limits around Punklorde, though. Actually stopping on the planet? Only preferable to a black hole, and even then, the recent addition of Mr Yang to the crew made that a bit more appealing.
Pom-Pom had dared to hope. Their adventures had been going spectacularly as of late. Himeko, absolutely brilliant in her isolation, had only ever struggled with supplying the materials needed to build something that could contain the stellarons, and even turn them into emergency fuel for the instruments that weren't powered by the Trailblaze itself. Welt's addition to the crew, along with his unique powers, made that a non-issue. Planets that had already been ravaged to extinction hindered their warp drive for little more than half an hour at a time. Besides which, Punklorde was home to some of the most brilliant, proactive people of all time.
It didn't matter if most of them were jerks that would stalk them for months afterwards. If there was ever a planet that could handle a Stellaron without outside help, it would be them.
Alas, Akivili had disappeared, and had taken all of the Nameless' luck with THEM. The Astral Expresses' numerous Stellaron sensors, yet another of Himeko's innovations, were already blinking by the time they lost all speed, coming to a halt over the planet so suddenly that the wheels sent sparks of quantum energy in every direction.
The annoyance was thick in the air of the conductor's cabin as Pom-Pom picked themselves up off the floor, slapping a paw irritably at the blinking light that indicated an incoming transmission from the parlour car. It was standard procedure for the conductor to ensure the condition of the train first and foremost, the others knew that, and-
Pom-Pom's annoyance slipped right through their ears, sinking low into the pit that was forming in their stomach. The Stellaron sensors were going haywire, and suddenly, Himeko's immediate call made perfect sense.
Five lights blinked back from the screen, their location pronounced in a rare occurrence of sheer power output, so close that it was a miracle the planet hadn't been swallowed behind an event horizon already. Pom-Pom's eyes drew lines between them as they reached for the comm; first in a pentagon, and then a perfect five-point star.
Too perfect, in fact. Almost like they had been placed there by hand.
It was official. Of all the mistakes Pom-Pom had let Akivili get away with, laying down the rails to Punklorde was by far the worst.
—
Twenty-five years usually felt like a lot, but for me, they'd slipped by without me really noticing.
How I'd gotten here was a mystery to me. The memories from my early childhood were mostly faded away, faded with the passing of time, but the memories from before then were still somewhat clear. They were also something that weren't supposed to be there, if I were to go off the reactions of everyone that I'd told.
"We're on Punklorde, brat." XxFuckingUrMomxX, my guildmaster and father, had grunted, before handing me a keyboard that was longer than my two year old body was tall. "Ain't no place in the universe called Earth. Work now, campaign writing later."
As a toddler, that made sense. If you didn't see something in the code, then that likely meant that it wasn't there. The sections we could edit were pretty small, and the sections we could see weren't much bigger, but the truth was in there for the people who knew how to read it.
It was much harder to deny as I grew older, and those memories began to acquire context. A childhood of playing with others my age in a land that actually had dirt in between their buildings. Using pencils and paper to write things, which hadn't existed for the last several hundred years. Reading books with hard covers and not from a screen, not having aethernet at some points in time, driving a car that had gears you needed to shift manually. The type of thing I would have expected to come from a medieval drama, but the memories were so visceral that I could feel them underneath my hands.
They were real, they had to be, but the code wouldn't show them to me. My guild would like to brag about how many layers they'd gotten through, how close they were to the base code. Everyone said the same thing, no matter which way you looked on the street, and I'd learned by the time I was six that none of them could be trusted.
Nobody was close. Nobody nearby was anywhere near close. Reality was a single step behind where they'd managed to go and for them, that was enough.
By the time I was seven, I was generating my own manifestations.
"It's actually pretty simple," The tiny slip of a girl that I'd found in the alleyway I'd spent the night in followed with rapt attention, the only part of her face not hidden beneath a hood and scarf engulfed with a thick pair of glasses. Around her were the fragmenting remains of what looked like dolls, and the successful attempt I'd made in my own image, which was waving desperately for my attention. "If you want them to be physical you need to create them on multiple levels and then merge reality in those sections down so that it traps the data between itself. It can't be rejected from existence if existence itself is holding it together."
Nice girl. Least annoying person I'd ever met, which was saying something, given everyone here was a massive pain in the ass. Still, the alley couldn't hold me forever, not when I felt the overwhelming urge to begin paying rent.
Even if the memories hadn't been real, I was able to take care of myself as though they were. I was living on my own a few days after my birthday, the guild an even more distant memory than anything that had happened in another life. Initially, I'd set out to build a house somewhere isolated, but not every guild on the planet were satisfied to be run by underachievers. I would be noticed, and people who were noticed without a clan backing them up didn't tend to last very long.
Hence the nights in alleys while I reevaluated my position.
The first thing I'd coded into reality in my terrible new apartment was a rubber duck, in honour of the man that had at least seen me through the first few years of my life. Not my father, he was useless, but another gamer in the guild by the name of Ducky. A decent person by Punklorde standards, which still meant he probably belonged in a cell, just not with maximum security. The second thing I manifested was a sandwich, and it was fucking delicious.
The spaceship I tried making to get me off this fucking planet wouldn't work, however. Far too many conflicting inputs at this level of reality. BlazeDPS down the street had filled the queue for the next several decades with individual mosquitos flapping their wings. How his aether editor allowed him to paste that many commands, I'd never know, nor would I care when he was inevitably beaten to death.
Live by the swarm, die by the swarm. Whoever maintained the various servers for the universe probably hated us in particular.
Really, the hard part was getting the right amount of code to show up. With so many others constantly writing their own, saving the changes that I wanted to make was generally a headache. In my shitty apartment, near the middle of Rainbow City? I'd have better luck doing my banking on the public wifi down the street that was literally only set up to scam actual children.
Not that it really mattered, seeing as all the money I moved around was fake anyway. I'd generated it myself from the code, given how simple it was to make it look legitimate after the fact. The IPC would likely suspect something, but they'd have no evidence that the few trillion credits sitting in my accounts had been pulled from thin air. It wasn't like every shareholder for every company attended the meetings across galaxies.
Providing for myself, thankfully, wouldn't be an issue. Merely basically everything else. I'd just need to go deeper, alter the permissions for myself.
For the next seventeen years, I immersed myself in the code.
There was always something different to witness and manipulate. And other people who occasionally showed up, but they weren't important.
It was fascinating. At first, the strings of numbers and letters hadn't meant much to me. They were significant, but they were lost in a language that I couldn't read. Every layer that I uncovered led to more, every mysterious word that I learned to decode bringing me closer to the foundation of the universe, and the truth of myself further within.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, I broke through. And then immediately afterwards, I passed out.
The change was instantaneous. I'd had access to my character files since I was nine, and I'd turned off a lot of the biological requirements that got in the way. The only one I kind of missed was eating, but not having to deal with the complications that came along with it was much more enjoyable.
The lighting of my room disappeared. The holographic screen I'd imagined faded from my fingertips, but I could still feel my edits safely in place. The area around me had grown dark, speckled with a shower of stars and numerous galaxies that shone with an aqua glow.
Even they paled in comparison to the monolithic machine that drifted before me.
The most striking feature was the red, glowing eye, its gaze fixed somewhere in the distance far beyond what I would have been able to see. Wires poked out from a body that had begun to fracture apart in places, the debris caught in the same orbit that had drawn me in.
Just looking at it made my head hurt, but I couldn't even allow myself to blink. Because as monumental as the machine itself was, the code that surrounded it was beautiful.
Punklorde was chaos incarnate. So many conflicting files battled for dominance in the streets that the traffic lights barely worked. Flying cars had been invented specifically because of how ruinous the roads had become. If there was something near the surface that could be defaced, it would be barely functional and covered in graffiti within minutes of discovery.
This, however… It was like a symphony. Majestic music that I shouldn't even have been able to read, even if that didn't occur to me at the moment. Everything was so intertwined, so harmonious, that it was almost impossible to see where the code stopped and reality began.
Fortunately for me, I'd made it something of a habit to figure out where the codes started.
'Hello?' My mouth moved, but the words dissipated before they could escape, fading away into the vacuum of space. The being before me took no interest, still acting as though it hadn't brought me here. Like it couldn't hear me at all.
This place… It felt real, yet fictional. More like my memories than anything I'd experienced so far.
So I shrugged, and reached out.
The moment I touched the code, the gigantic eye snapped down to me. It blinked, an action I wouldn't have assumed it was capable of, and I blinked right back, even while I scrolled and copied all that I could find into my own files. It was only through force of habit that my fingers continued to move under the weight of THEIR gaze.
function_speak: A PARASITE?
Hey buddy, fuck you too.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, the celestial expanses flared. For a moment, I couldn't move at all, but the pressure eased at the first twitch of my finger. Like a test had been passed, an acknowledgement reached.
The cosmos around us glowed as the last of what I'd seen was securely saved away within me. The retaliation I'd been somewhat expecting never came, unless it was in the form of the dreamlike surroundings beginning to fade away. That glowing, immense red eye followed my forced retreat, the stars growing brighter even as they were stripped away from my consciousness.
function_speak: A PRODIGY.
—
I awoke the next day, with the spaceship I'd attempted to form years ago sitting on the roof of my apartment complex. Unfortunately, I hadn't been the first one to find it, and given the absolutely trashed state it had been left in, no part of my imagination had seen fit to figure out a way of fueling it. Otherwise it would have been stolen, and then trashed elsewhere. Either way, I shrugged, dissipating the wreckage into quantum particles and making my way back inside. It was due to rain soon, and this section of the atmosphere was threatening acid.
Even if my coding was finally starting to work on a level that I wanted, I didn't really have a plan to go forth with. Punklorde's record keeping was a nightmare at the best of times, with so many identities stolen so often that they'd become interchangeable. Usually people only picked out their names once they were confident they would manage to keep it. I still hadn't figured one out for myself, but that was more due to the fact that it had never been important enough for me to think about it.
I was me. Myself. Simple, easy, and absolutely not good enough for any of the IPC checkpoints that would be ready to meet me if I didn't do the braindead thing and fly blindly into the biggest deadzone a collective consciousness could imagine. Sure, theoretically I could figure out a generator to get me across space to somewhere new. Dyson spheres had been around forever and a day, but any nearby candidate stars had already been claimed. Besides, I had no need for the entire station that would be necessary to maintain one.
An artificial miniature star might have worked, if the output could be matched to the created engine, but unless I found a Genius Society member that was dumb enough to be found by a Punklordian, I wouldn't be getting my hands on one of them either. Maybe a sweep of the planet would yield a Stellaron, not that we needed the help in destroying what was left of our environment, but that seemed even less likely.
…Unless I made one myself.
The idea stuck itself into my head more securely than the vaguely green slime the previous tenant had left on the bathroom ceiling. The firewalls I maintained around my apartment were more advanced than anything else I'd come across, but I spent the day strengthening them further with my new god given program.
I would probably have to eventually process the fact that I'd seen an Aeon, and more importantly, that an Aeon had seen me. That could come later, with a bottle of something that was hopefully imported from off-planet. It didn't matter how drunk it would get me, I was not going to put something called 'Gamer Juice' in my mouth.
Besides, the last time I drunk-coded, SapphireTiger from next door became a bit more literal than just a name she'd chosen for herself. Latest word from the zoo was that she had escaped, again, and her body count was approaching triple digits. Still a ways to go until she topped that leaderboard, but she had the advantage of being the only one still alive running the category.
Two hours, numerous knocks at my door, and a stink-bombing that bounced off my window later, and the protections were in place. The code would last until I turned it off manually, subsisting on the aether of the universe itself even if I wasn't around, so even if this went catastrophically wrong everyone else would be fine. Nobody would really miss me if I blew myself up with a faulty experiment, and I wouldn't miss anyone else if they were somehow smart enough to figure this out and dumb enough to try it, but it was the principle of the matter.
Even if this was a mistake and I didn't make it, I couldn't really find it within myself to mind. Punklorde was all I'd truly known, phantom sensations of a greener planet aside, and there… There was no future here. Trying to build a future was pointless; the only things that weren't torn down were the structures too sturdy to be moved.
I didn't want to be immovable. Not here.
The code for Stellarons was long. Longer than I was honestly expecting. Massive and destructive balls of chemistry stars may have been, ultimately they were quite simple constructs. The right elements, the right concentrations, the right environment, and you'd probably be able to mix one right up.
Writing up a star and morphing it into a Stellaron? Somewhat complicated, but even then, nothing I hadn't been expecting. The real trouble came with the third and final step, which was actually making sure the fucker didn't explode in my face immediately.
Well, the second fucker. Step 3.5 was regrowing my eyebrows and removing the numerous cancers from my body.
It was likely holding water in the palms of my hands and then clapping. If anything splashed out, then disaster was likely imminent. Stellarons were unnatural by nature of their creation, but the 'naturally' occurring ones from Nanook and his factions didn't have this issue. They degraded, yes, but it took them centuries rather than the seconds that mine were lasting.
The code taunted me as I sat on my ratty couch, scratching at my chin. The power output was level, within acceptable range for what I would have expected of an actual star, but the Destructive energy was massive. There was nothing wrong with the strings I'd written, at least in theory, but the structure was off.
I gave myself five seconds to contemplate the utter mess I'd spewed out into the aether. Then, with a shrug, I cut the energy output in half, and looped it back around onto itself within the core.
It was the simplest solution. It was also more than likely going to create an explosion that would be seen from neighbouring solar systems. I held my breath as the Stellaron's form warbled in my hands, the plasma pleasantly warm on my skin, before settling completely into a sparkling orb that hovered just above my fingers.
I blinked down at it. If it had a face and were capable of displaying human emotion, it probably would have blinked at me. Or done something with the wisps of energy that hovered about its form, bathing my living room in a golden glow.
It didn't explode. The product of Destruction incarnate, remade in my living room with my bare hands, and it didn't explode. The disrespect of this simple action would live on within my family line as a legend for generations to come. The only way I could have made my ancestors more proud was if I teamkilled Nanook and then teabagged his corpse.
That could come later, however. Right now, I wanted to make some more.
—
It was a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday that I opened my front door to an older man, the singularity in his cane doing its utmost to break through the numerous shields I'd deployed around my apartment once I realised he was coming.
"Good morning," he said, adjusting his glasses and acting like he hadn't just been throwing around enough power to erase the entire planet. "Would you like to talk to me about Stellarons?"
I narrowed my eyes at him. He did nothing but stand there, his face remarkably neutral considering all the insults I knew he would have had to endure to get this far into Rainbow City.
"Fucking Witnesses of Destruction," I muttered, slamming the door in his face.
He broke it down three minutes later, bringing with him something I'd never felt before.
Hope.
Oh and also a fucking black hole.