alfvaen | Botober 31: Disentanglement (Reply)

Okay, fine, let's ring out Botober with a big crossover event. I'm going to blame Ceej for this one. Not that it might not have occurred to me anyway, but... The prompts for the last day of Botober were:

Things: One Hundred Billion Bats
Concepts: self-destruct code
Advanced: Another copy of this same image
Terrible: A bin full of garden worms pulsing in a black light

Disentanglement

Dr. Helvia strode into the rotunda, Kasia and Hamnet creeping more cautiously at her heels. All around the edges of the room, a rogue's gallery of figures entered in a variety of fashions. Some of them were dressed like witches and wizards, though among them Hamnet saw a boy carrying a bin filled with odd, glowing objects crawling around like worms. Some of the figures were animals...a tiny pterosaur flapping in, a tortoise walking on its hind legs, a shimmering butterfly, and he could swear he saw a giraffe out of the corner of his eye, but when he went to look at it there was nothing there. And some were ordinary-looking people: a woman in a facemask and wireless headphones, a hunted-looking middle-aged man dressed like a TV show host, a couple of people in some kind of weird sci-fi cosplay...

In the center of the rotunda was some kind a console he hadn't seen before, round with a number of protuberances. Was this the destination that Dr. Helvia had had in mind?

"Welcome!" Dr. Helvia shouted. "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here today!"

"Is it for rescuing of larvae?" said the butterfly, or possibly it was sending telepathically. It fluttered in alarm over the bowl of glowing worms, which the boy instinctively hugged to his chest.

"Our worlds are crashing together!" Dr. Helvia said. "Surely you consider this somewhat alarming? The cause was here in my own world, I'm afraid, but now it's spread throughout all of yours too. Here I find a place where we can make it stop. But by this point we'll have to do it together."

As they drew closer, Hamnet could see that the protuberances were handles of some sort. All of them seemed to be different, but in some way they lined up with the people and creatures drawing toward them.

"Why us, though?" asked the middle-aged man. "I mean, if we do this we'll all go back to our own worlds, right? Well, on my world right now I'm in a bad situation that I wouldn't mind getting out of. Got to be someplace I can hide out."

"Yeah? You want to take your problems to some other world that doesn't need them?" the masked woman said. "I gather not all of you are in the middle of a pandemic right now, but my world is, and anybody tried to leave, they'd just be spreading it somewhere else. Take responsibility for your own problems." The man grumbled and subsided, but he still flicked his eyes from side to side as if looking for an escape.

They all, in the end, came up to their appropriate handle, even the butterly and the pterosaur and possibly the invisible giraffes. Dr. Helvia paused before the one handle which had been allocated to their own world, and she waved Hamnet onward; after exchanging glances with Kasia, who shrugged, he stepped up. The handle was translucent crystal, or glass, or plastic, with faint indentations matching his fingers. Once he grasped it he felt an odd reluctant to let it go.

"So what will this do?" one of the witches asked.

"It'll trigger the self-destruct code in the particle accelerator," Dr. Helvia said. "It should have been triggered before now, but some of the failsafe systems apparently failed. So I had find a place where this console existed to trigger it manually. The easiest way was with consensus."

"Some sort of group ritual apparatus to slay this runaway demon," one of the wizards muttered. "Why these people can't just the simple, agreed-upon terminology..."

"Hurry! This isn't entirely stable yet, and at any moment it could--"

She was interrupted by a cloud of black fluttering things descending from above, the ceiling or outer space or what, Hamnet wasn't sure. It was like a hundred billion bats fluttering around. If it wasn't for the uncanny sureness of his grip on the handle, he would have probably lost it entirely. Cries of dismay from all around mixed with the high-pitched squeaking of the bats or whatever they were. One unknown voice said "Look tasty!".

"NOW!" Dr. Helvia called. Hamnet took the cue and pulled as hard as he could on the handle. After an initial reluctance it began to move slowly but without further resistance, and a humming sound gradually began to build up. He couldn't see much of the activity of the others around him, but he caught a glimpse of the tortoise on his immediate right moving his handle in a different but apparently equally effective manner, and something definitely seemed to be happening. The bats began to fade, become mere shadows, dark transparencies, and then the rest of the console began to split apart and fade, like copies of the same image being teased apart, the other worlds edited out of this one.

As the handle moved into its final position with a decisive click, Hamnet suddenly wondered if, when the particle accelerator in this world self-destructed, then he and Kasia and Dr. Helvia, and anyone else in this world nearby, were going to be destroyed with it. But by that point, of course, it was too late.

Instead, it was more like an unlubricated piece of machinery grinding to halt. Shrieking sounds, vast shudderings, and then, finally, a silence which left ringing in the ears.

"Right, that's it then," Dr. Helvia said with some satisfaction. "I suppose it's too much to hope that somebody, somewhere was taking some readings of all this."

"Wait--why are you still a woman?" Hamnet said suddenly. "I'm positive you were a man before."

She shrugged. "Not everything will go back to the way it was before. The worlds are separate again, that's the important thing. Perhaps in the future we'll be able to repeat this under more controlled conditions. But until then..."

Hamnet looked in his backpack again. Still 'How Howie Trained The Hogs' by Ablah Titlow. He sighed.

So yeah, I guess if I'd been trying I could have tied things together earlier. The space worms and the space butterfly and maybe the talking worm trying to help Bennet could all be the same things. Probably Master Selden knows Augustina the Pastamancer and Myrilla and Helene and all the rest. Demonax may have passed through Catriona's space station. Maybe Trina's dog is related to Allonia's chickens. But that way, perhaps, lies madness.

Anyway, I suppose it was kind of fun. Always a nice challenge to try to tie together these disparate elements. Like my old four-word stories, as I mentioned, or even the crossover fanfic I would do from time to time. I suppose now I should return to my revisions of Bleen & Grue sometime this year...we'll see if I've managed to condition myself to do daily writing, or if I've just exhausted my creative stores for the year. If you're reading this, then feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you thought, here or on Twitter or wherever. Because sometimes I'm okay just shouting into the void, but sometimes it's nice if the void shouts back.