Heretical Edge

From Time To Time 28-28 - Jazz And Theia



I had no idea what to expect when going into a Fomorian child's mind. Really, I had no idea what to expect when going into any Fomorian's mind. Especially the true, original Fomorians. If it had been the corrupted, Cronus versions from the present, the place would have been a total horror show. I was pretty sure the nightmares from something like that would have lasted for the rest of my life. But this was different. This was a Fomorian who wasn't affected by that, an innocent kid. And speaking of minds, yes, the very concept of an uncorrupted, innocent Fomorian child was still blowing mine.

So yeah, we were going into this completely blind. We didn't know enough about Fomorians, the way their childhoods worked, or even what their homes looked like to even make a slight guess at what we would be looking at when we arrived. All these rebel Fomorians grew up in the ships, right? Was that going to be what the inside of this kid's personal mental projection looked like?

As it turned out, the answer was no. Instead, the moment our combined form possessed the kid, we found ourselves standing on the balcony partway up some massive tower overlooking a big courtyard about fifty feet below us (the tower itself continued on into the clouds). The building was at the top of the octagon-shaped courtyard below, which had to be a good thousand feet or so across. And that entire space down there was filled with soldiers. They were all different sizes and shapes, but every single one of them was wearing the exact same patch somewhere on the uniform. It was a patch that showed what looked like an outline of Wreth's head, with symbols in the center that I was going to guess had something to do with naming and praising the bastard.

All three of us had appeared separately here, even though we were combined when we started. I supposed that had something to do with all of us having different minds and seeing ourselves as separate people, or… something. The point was, we were standing on that balcony looking at those soldiers far below. Soldiers who were chanting what sounded suspiciously like a religious prayer or something while gazing adoringly up at us. Wait, no, they weren't looking at us. They were staring past us, higher up the tower to another balcony directly above. I had the slightest suspicion about who and what they were staring at, given the patches they wore and the gross cultish chanting they were doing. This was weird. This was really fucking weird and unsettling.

Even as I turned slightly to look up at the bottom of the balcony above us reflexively, my focus was drawn to movement from one side, just out of the corner of my eye. My gaze snapped that way, hands rising defensively as I realized the three of us weren't alone on this balcony after all. My item-sense hadn't warned me about it, probably because it wasn't saying anything at all. We were inside this kid's mind, none of my powers were working. I really should've assumed that.

In any case, my eyes snapped toward what I thought was a threat, something manifested to kick us out of the kid's mind either by him or whatever part of Wreth was actually here. Except I was wrong. This wasn't a possession defense or anything like that. It wasn't a threat at all. It was a--

"Flick?" Jazz, standing next to me, blurted while pivoting the same way to take in the figure. She was staring--we were all staring-- at another version of me. A version of me wearing very greasy coveralls, with a full toolbelt hanging around her waist, her shorter hair colored bright blue. She was a quite familiar figure for me, even setting aside the whole looking like my identical twin bit. Well, not quite identical twin at the moment, since I was still in my Jacob appearance, but still.

"Rig?" I both corrected Jazz and questioned in surprise, stepping that way to embrace the other me quickly. "How are--oh. Well, I guess if the three of us showed up separately, it makes sense for you to be here too." As much sense as anything in this situation did, anyway. It was all weird.

"Yup, I guess that's why I'm here," Rig agreed with a shrug. She patted herself down as though testing to make sure she was as solid as she could be. "It's like being back in the Archive, but we can't control this one." Leaning forward, she looked down at the creepy chanting people, making a face. "And boy do I really wish we could change things here. Cuz that shit down there is super weird."

Theia and Jazz stared back and forth between us, the two of them taking that in. "Wow," the latter murmured softly, her voice barely audible past the continued creepy chanting from below, "I mean, yeah, we knew there were more of you and that she was a totally different version of-- sure, we knew all that, but it's kind of different seeing both of you there side by side like this."

"Wait till you go in our Archive," Rig informed her. "Then you can see a whole bunch more of us."

"Sounds like Ruthers' nightmare," Jazz replied with a small smirk before sobering. "But I guess we should focus on getting back to the present so you can really terrify him. Which means--"

"Getting up there to see what these people are chanting at," Theia finished for her, head tilted to look up that way. "And then dealing with it. Which might be a bit more difficult than we thought."

"You mean because we don't have any powers or magic in here?" I grimaced. "Yeah, I guess we don't get to use any of that inside someone else's mindscape. But don't forget, it's not really Wreth's either. He doesn't belong here any more than we do. Let's just… get up there and see."

Boy was it weird, not having any powers. I couldn't summon ghosts to go right up through the bottom of the balcony above us to see what was up there. I couldn't sense any objects. Jazz couldn't turn the balcony intangible. I couldn't teleport. Theia couldn't use any spells. Hell, I didn't even have my staff because the magical storage pockets weren't a thing. The four of us simply… walked through the nearby doorway, looking for a way up to the next level. I had no real idea what we were going to do once we got there, especially if Wreth was really in control. He couldn't be as firmly planted in this place as he'd intended to be, not with the spells Theia had used. There had to be a way to shove him out, we just… had to figure out how to do it without hurting the kid.

But first we had to find our way up there. As we came off the balcony and into the main building, we found ourselves in a circular corridor, with polished hardwood floors and walls lined with pictures of Wreth and what I presumed was his family. There was a door straight ahead of us that was open, leading to a wide open room that looked like some sort of trophy area. There were glass cases full of all sorts of things Wreth thought were special and unique. The hallway curved to the left and right, and we saw stairs leading up the latter way.

So, that's where we went, running together as I tried to figure out exactly what we could do if it came down to a fight. We weren't completely helpless, obviously, each of us had plenty of combat experience. But we had that experience with our powers, magic, and weapons. None of which we had now. And we had no idea what Wreth was capable of. All those people down in that courtyard obviously weren't real. None of this was, it was inside the kid's mindscape. But if Wreth had enough influence over things to make all of this appear, he could probably use those people to attack us, and… maybe even drive us out or something? Yeah, I didn't know for sure.

What I did know was that we had to do everything we could to get the kid to realize he was the one in control here, and that he needed to expel Wreth. The question was how could we do that when none of us knew anything about Fomorian children. We didn't know how to talk to them.

Not for the first time, I wished Gaia was here. Or my mother. Or Sariel. Any of them would have been a better choice for this than we were. They would've known what to do. They wouldn't be running into this so blind and clueless. Any of them would have had a real plan. They'd be better at this.

But they weren't here, we were, and we had to muddle our way through. There was no one else. Taking the stairs three at a time, we raced up to the next floor. A couple armored troops were there, and I had just enough time to think we were in trouble before Jazz and Theia both hurled themselves that way, tackling the pair right to the ground while shouting for us to keep going.

Just like the area downstairs, there was an open doorway leading out to the balcony there, straight to the left of the stairs and slightly forward. I leapt over the fallen troops, not sparing a single glance that way. I just had to hope that the other two could keep them down long enough. Actually, knowing Theia the way I did, she could probably have killed them both before they blinked if they reacted like normal living beings. But we had no idea if lethal damage would do anything in here. It was just--yeah, I had to keep going, get to the kid, and then… do something.

Leaving the others behind with that, Rig and I took three quick, lunging steps after landing just past them and hurled ourselves through that open doorway to come out on the balcony. I had my hands up, ready to throw start throwing punches the moment I saw that smug, arrogant little piece of shi--

"Why hello there," Wreth greeted me, cutting through my thoughts. He was there, on the other side of the wide balcony. The short man was perched casually against the railing, holding a glass of some liquid he was sipping from. Next to him was the kid, though their back was to me as they stared out over the audience below. I couldn't see the face to get any sort of indication of how they felt about it, what they were thinking, or anything. They just stood there, staring down.

"I must admit," the megalomaniac remarked while looking back and forth between Rig and me, "you've made this situation exceptionally difficult. Far more so than it needed to be. This should have been a simple process of taking what belongs to me, but thanks to you…" He reached out as though trying to grab hold of the kid next to him, only for his hand to pass right through them.

"Oh, I'm sorry, should I be sad because you can't infest some innocent kid and overwrite their entire personality? Cuz I'm not." That was Rig, snapping the words as she tugged a very heavy-looking wrench from the belt around her waist and brandished it. "But I might feel bad about the mess your thick skull is about to make out of my perfectly good tuegh-spanner."

"Bit slow, aren't you?" the cyborg-Fomorian retorted. "We aren't in the physical world, none of this matters. You can't do anything meaningful to me, but I, well…" His hand waved in front of the kid's face as though getting their attention, without taking his eyes off us. "There are intruders in our midst, your excellence. You should summon the guards to have them… expelled from these lands."

"Are you seriously trying to play Grand Vizier to this kid?" My head shook with disbelief. "I'd say that's the oldest trick in the book, but we're so far back in the past this may actually be the first time. But still, you're done, Wreth. Your body is gone, you're not taking over this one, just stop."

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"Yeah, you don't have to listen to this guy, kid," Rig put in while still brandishing that tool. "Like he said himself, he doesn't have any power over you. You can do whatever you want here."

"Power over them?" Wreth purred the words. "I'm merely helping them achieve greatness."

I snorted, still trying to see the kid's face, but they wouldn't turn around. "Yeah? Well what if we have something better to offer than you do?"

He just laughed at me. "I will be with this child forever. I will guide them, lead them to glory. I offer them command of the greatest empire in all existence, a domain that stretches across thousands of planets and trillions of subjects. I offer them the opportunity to be the single most important being in the history of this universe. And what do you have to offer them instead?"

"What do we have to offer?" A thousand different possible responses to that ran through my mind, as I stared at the kid's back. Why wouldn't they look at me? Were they ashamed? Just so interested in the chanting going on below? Angry? Sad? Scared? It could have been any of those things, or something completely different. Hell, they could even be--

"Bored!" I abruptly realized. "They're bored! They're a kid, they're bored! They don't want to stand here looking at a bunch of chanting brainwashed people, that's boring! That's what you want, not what they want. You don't even know what a kid… Oh. Oh, you wanna know what we can offer that you can't? Well, let me show you exactly what we can give them."

With that, I focused. Sure, I didn't have my powers in here or anything like that. But I had remembered what Rig said before, about how it was too bad we couldn't change this place. Which made me think, why not? Why couldn't we? If Wreth could do it, we should be able to, right? He created all of this, so what was stopping me from making changes to that? Besides his own willpower pushing back against me. And that was where I had the advantage. Because I wasn't alone. Rig immediately realized what I was doing, our thoughts moving the same way as she joined in. I couldn't consciously hear the rest of the Flique at the moment, but I felt them paying attention. I felt them following my lead, jumping in to add their own willpower to mine. Wreth's attempt to hold us back floundered, the Fomorian cyborg letting out a grunted curse as he felt his control over this entire space fall apart. It changed. It morphed.

We weren't standing on a tower anymore. All of that was gone. The soldiers were gone, the chanting was gone, there were no more people worshipping and praying or whatever. Together, we had erased all that boring shit. Now we were in a grassy field, with low trees nearby. Except something was different about this field, about the trees, about everything, even the clouds in the sky. They didn't look normal. They looked bright, colorful, and completely unnatural. Because we weren't in a normal world. We hadn't created this place to look like something real. We made it that way because we were in a cartoon. We put ourselves in a cartoon.

And yes, that meant that we were cartoons too. My body, as Jacob, was animated. So were Rig, the Fomorian kid, even Wreth. Nearby, Theia and Jazz were looking around as cartoons too. And not just any cartoons. We were all animated in the classic Looney Tunes style. And because it would have been boring to appear as normal humans in a Looney Tunes animation, we were anthropomorphic animals. Theia looked like a humanoid honey badger in sleek leather armor. Jazz was a bright blue octopus using several tentacles to stand up and the rest like arms. She wore a beret and bow tie. Rig was a beaver wearing overalls and a backwards cap. And me? Well, I was still in Jacob mode, wearing those clothes. But I was also a raven. Yeah, a humanoid raven in a fancy suit.

I had seen a lot of weird things, obviously, but this was… yeah. It was a lot, and we were the ones making it happen.

Now the Fomorian kid was actually paying attention. I saw them take a step back, looking around to take in the sights before staring at their own hands. They turned to stare at the rest of us, and I saw their face for the first time since we'd come into this mindscape. Well, an animated version of their face anyway. We had left both them and Wreth looking mostly like themselves. Their eyes, already large and exaggerated from being a cartoon, were wide with surprise and confusion.

"What in the name of Yekluauk is this!?" Wreth was fairly twitching with anger and disbelief. I felt him straining to change things back, but one mind against all of mine just wasn't going to cut it, no matter how strong-willed he might have been.

He started to say something else, but honey badger Theia literally skipped over to him, passing by me. Her hand reached out, grabbed his bottom lip, then yanked it out. Since he was a cartoon now, the lip stretched like taffy, allowing her to haul it up over his face, turning the man's protests into muffled cries while he staggered away from her and clawed at his stretched lip, trying to pull it down off his head. But Theia held onto him, while octopus Jazz produced a bright red marker out of nowhere and reached out with one of her tentacles to draw a big smiley face on the stretched out cartoon lip that was covering his actual face. "There," she announced, "much more handsome this way."

A sound came then, from the Fomorian child. It took me just a second to realize they were giggling, before quickly covering their mouth like they were afraid they'd done something wrong.

Leaving Theia and Jazz to keep Wreth occupied, Rig and I stepped that way. I smiled at the kid. "Hey, buddy. You wanna see something fun?" When they hesitantly nodded, I gently reached out with a wing to take one hand while beaver Rig took the other. Together, we led them away from that spot. We moved through the field, while focusing on what we wanted to show the kid. And it started with a sign. Well, many signs, actually, all of them nailed into nearby trees or sticking out of the ground. The signs all said the same thing: Rabbit Season.

Yes, we were sharing that classic Rabbit Season-Duck Season cartoon with the kid. Except we were actually doing so in a fully three dimensional way. We were in the cartoon. In the distance, the sound of Bugs and Daffy arguing in front of Elmer, followed by a shotgun blast, filled the air.

Leading the Fomorian kid that way, we all watched the ensuing scene, at least as well as the Flique could recreate it from our memories.

The Fomorian kid sure wasn't staring off at nothing anymore. They weren't bored. They laughed with delight, watching the ensuing action the whole time. Even after we were done with the original cartoon, we made up a few others, partially from memory. The kid seemed especially taken with Daffy Duck, almost mesmerized by the figure. His voice made them laugh even more, so we kept that going as much as we could, showing him all sorts of animated duck adventures. Including, of course, Duck Dodgers.

"Daffy!" That was the first real thing the kid said, their first words as far as we had heard. They pointed at the black-feathered cartoon, bouncing up and down. "Daffy, Daffy!"

"Damn straight, Daffy," I confirmed, smiling despite myself. The kid's excitement and enthusiasm was contagious, Fomorian or not. They didn't need to stand on some giant tower being worshipped by people. They didn't need the promise of ruling over a whole galaxy. That was what Wreth didn't understand. The kid wasn't like him. He couldn't comprehend the idea of not wanting to be a dictator. He thought he could get the kid on his side just by showing them what he liked.

But they were a kid. They wanted something fun to do, something fun to see. So, we showed them cartoons. Living cartoons. And they loved it. They watched more and more of the antics being carried out around us with delight and amazement.

Finally, I took a knee in front of them, meeting their gaze with my own raven eyes. "This is your choice, understand? Who do you want to stay with? He promised you the whole galaxy." My eyes flicked over toward where Wreth was still being held by Jazz with several of her tentacles, though his lip was down so his angry face could be seen. "I can't promise you that. Nothing like it. The only thing I can promise is that I won't abandon you. I'll be there with you. I'll try to help you, try to teach you. We'll have fun, but some of it will be scary too. It will be real. We'll goof around, we'll help people, we'll live, we'll cry, we'll run and jump and fight and scream, and all of it will be real. Those cartoons you just saw, they're fun to watch, but they're not real. The real world can be scary and sad, but also fun, and things matter there. They really matter, and we need your help. But I won't force you to do anything. It's your choice."

Once again, I looked at Wreth. "He says he'll hand you the universe. Me, the rest of us? The only thing we can promise is that we will show you the universe, and let you be whoever you decide to be. He wants to turn you into him. I want you to show me who you can be. So you tell me, you decide, who do you want to be with now? What do you want?"

Wreth started to say something, his fury becoming almost a physical presence as his mouth opened to bellow something. But he was interrupted by two words from the kid next to me.

"Rabbit Season."

And then Wreth was gone. He vanished, cast out like he had never been there. He vanished in a puff of dark smoke, and somehow I knew he was gone for good. The kid had shoved the remnants of Wreth out of their mind. And the Fomorian kid? Well, they transformed into a familiar cartoon duck version of themself in the same moment. Actually, they kind of looked like Plucky Duck.

I hugged the kid. I wasn't even thinking about the Fomorian thing right then, I just embraced them. So did Rig. Jazz and Theia joined after a moment. We embraced them… and then reality shifted around us.

We were back in the real world, back in that field by the lake, in our own bodies, not possessing one another anymore and no longer animated animals. Well, three of us were anyway. Rig was back in my head. And the kid's physical body was out of the tube, standing with us. They gazed up at me, giving a bright smile while looking around. "Real?"

"Real," I confirmed, exchanging a look with the others. "Thanks, uhh… kid."

"Daffy," they corrected me, touching their own forehead. The small Fomorian figure was so young they seemed like the equivalent of a seven or eight year old human, standing barely up to my chest. "Daffy," they repeated firmly.

Grinning despite myself, I agreed. "Okay, Daffy, it's nice to meet you."

"What are we gonna do with them now?" Jazz asked. "I mean, what's going to happen?"

"We'll teach them, help them, learn from them, have fun with them," I replied. "We'll live with them. As for the specifics, we'll figure out what to do with them on the other side of all this." A grimace escaped me while I took Daffy's hand and squeezed it. "No chance we're waiting around to see if more of Wreth's people show up sooner than Kaur thought they would."

Somehow, I knew that the kid could go through the rift with me. I wasn't sure how that was possible, or how I knew, but I did.

Probably Ceili helping again, Rig noted. That seems like her.

With everything as settled as it could be, and the already abandoned battlefield even more empty than it had already been, I transported all of us down to the rift. The Fomorians had left the cube around the thing intact for us. Apparently it would disintegrate soon after the remaining rift was gone. And yeah, I could tell there was only one of the things now, it looked a lot more stable. Even then, however, I could feel the thing tugging at me. It wanted me to go through. Yet also wanted me to leave it alone. It was a push-pull sort of thing. It was like it wanted me to step into it, but knew it would cease to exist once I did.

With the cube full of Fomorian tech held safely in one hand, I looked to the other two. "Thanks, guys. I couldn't have done any of this without you."

"I believe you would have found a way," Theia murmured dryly. She was staring at Daffy like she wanted to say something else, but in the end, all she did was reach up and take that New York Rangers cap off, before she carefully set it on their head. Her voice caught. "This helped me learn to be my own person. Maybe it can help you too."

We all exchanged quick hugs then, a motion Daffy seemed to like. They kept reaching up to make sure the hat was still there every couple seconds, while I assured the other two that as far as I understood, they would be sent back to where and when they belonged once I passed through the rift.

With that, there was nothing else to do, nothing holding me here. I made sure the cube was in my pocket, then reached out to take Daffy's hand and squeezed it. "Okay, well, here goes nothing."

Together, the two of us took a step forward and passed through the rift, leaving prehistoric Earth behind.


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