Kobolds From Space 2: Kobold of Shadowsby terryclothChaptersI SpyAdventure PartyInto the DarknessKobold of ShadowsBaby Kobold of Baby ShadowsFirst MissionDragons are Always the SolutionEpilogueDiamond Dog DungeonDiamond Dog of DarknessI SpyThings got a bit tense after that. Fire and Star, and the diamond dogs watching the puppies, were always stressed and during one play period we heard two of the caretakers arguing about whether the Alpha was doing the right thing, cracking down on anti-kobold sentiment. Apparently there was anti-kobold sentiment. The next time we woke up, half the puppies were missing. “They go home, to learn like dogs always do,” the remaining caretaker said, with a sigh. “They don’t learn as much, but some dogs think it’s more important to learn the right things.” I was just miserable for a different reason. Perro and Star between them were able to set my broken bones and knit them together quickly – they were mostly things like ribs and shoulder blades that weren’t easily replaced with cybernetics anyway – but I spent an extra week in school while everyone else got put back in reality to play, because it would have been too painful. I was still pretty sore the week after, but it was bearable, at least according to Star who didn’t have to bear it. There weren’t a lot of physical sensations in our accelerated virtual world, so the only thing I felt for almost a year was pain. I’d heard the stories about how Star cut off their arms and legs on purpose to get them replaced with robot limbs, and I was starting to think that maybe I wanted to do something similar. But it did get better, eventually, and just as I was finally starting to get used to the idea of enjoying life again, we graduated. Star and Wave, of all people, were there to greet us, along with Wave’s dragon-friend and their gaggle of baby half-dragons, who were lurking around looking menacing, all spiky fur and horns and teeth. “Congratulations!” Star said. “You’re now all officially adults. You’re old enough to pick a name, and an icon, and a specialized field of study!” “And old enough to make decisions on your own,” Wave added. “Once you’re registered, you’ll have full control over your own rig.” “This is a big responsibility!” Star said. “But don’t worry, we can guide you through everything, as much as you need. We’re here to help!” “Where’s Fire?” asked Eff. There were some other mumbles from the crowd. “He’s… busy,” Star said. “He’s in the palace,” the dragon said, “ruling the pack.” “That idiot!” Wave said, throwing up her hands. “What happened?” Ay asked. “Are we taking over? Should we start breeding an army of kobolds to devour the world now?” “If you want!” Star said. “But no we’re not taking over.” “Aren’t we?” Wave asked. The dragon shook her head, and explained for the rest of us, “They found a big nest of rebels, and rumor said it was where they were holding the warp crystal. The Alpha and his guards went in to get it back. It was a trap, the crystal wasn’t there, and the Alpha was killed.” “Fire finished off the surviving rebels, and everyone on our side who got killed was brought back. Perro’s spell worked just like it was supposed to!” Star said. “But the diamond dogs have a rule,” the dragon said. “Whoever kills the Alpha is the new Alpha. Being brought back from the dead doesn’t change that. Fire killed the dog who killed the Alpha, so he’s Alpha right now.” “If they don’t have to die permanently, can’t the Alpha just kill Fire and let us bring him back?” Ay asked. “You would think!” Wave shouted, throwing up her hands again. “But no, Fire wants to make some changes first.” “He just wants to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Star said. “He’s an idiot,” the dragon said. “If the conservatives weren’t protecting him, he’d already have been assassinated.” “I’d like to see them try!” Star said, “Actually no I wouldn’t, too many people would die. I don’t get why they’re on our side though?” “They’re not,” Wave said, mouth-line changing to a jagged sawblade. “But they think arranging for a fight with a predetermined conclusion is cheating.” The adults seemed to finally notice that we were all staring at them. Star gave a big, jagged grin, and said, “If any of you weren’t completely confused or annoyed by all that talk of politics, I know *just* the specialty for you!” “We have to register everyone first before we start assigning jobs,” Wave said. “I know,” Star said, their faceplate changing into a spinning star. “I’m the one who looked up the procedure, and I’m the one who’s going to have to do it. Just make sure your demon-babies don’t devour the puppies while I get them processed.” For some reason, the procedure had to be done in the real world despite almost none of it affecting the real world in any way. I think it was because they were changing all my settings and needed to completely reboot my account or something like that. “Alright, CeeCee,” Star said. “This is pretty simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. I just need your name, icon, gender if any, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits.” “Raven Darktalon of the Endless Abyss,” I said. “I need a one word name that represents your icon,” Star said, patiently. “You can set your display name to Raven Darktalon of the… um… you can set it to whatever you want afterwards. Raven and Talon would both work, there are good icons for those.” “Raven, then,” I said, flattening my ears. I didn’t realize they *forced* our names to be boring. “Alright, here are the raven-related icons from the library,” Star said, and an array of twenty different birds and bird heads and feathers spread out across my faceplate. “Unless you had something else in mind? You can also draw one if you want.” I was pretty sure I couldn’t draw a raven to save my life, so I picked one that looked appropriately menacing. “Can I change it later?” “Technically yes?” Star said. “It’s the same procedure to change it as I’m using to set it right now, so if you change your mind by the time I’m finished with everyone it’ll be no trouble. Otherwise it’ll be some trouble, so you can figure it out yourself. Gender?” “Huh?” “Are you a girl or a boy or both or neither or undecided?” Star asked. “I didn’t know that was a setting,” I said. Star shrugged. “It’s not but Wave wanted me to ask. You’re a girl, aren’t you?” “I guess,” I said. “Okay, I’ll mark you down as ‘girl, I guess ’. Now, what color do you want to set your rig to? That’s easier to change but it’s easier on everyone else if you don’t.” “Black of course.” “No, I mean the glowy bits,” Star said. “Black.” “No,” Star said, deadpan. “You can’t have your rig show your face and icons in black. No one would be able to see it.” I pouted. “But ravens are black!” “They aren’t,” said the dragon, startling me. I hadn’t realized she was listening. “I like working with their feathers. They’re kind of black but also a bunch of different colors.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it.” “Huh,” Star said. “She’s kind of right.” She sent me a packet of pictures of ravens, and I flipped through them. I’d seen most of them before, but now that I was looking… yeah. They were black at first glance, but a glossy black and the gloss was all different colors. A very dark-hued rainbow. “Like a rainbow of darkness,” I said. “Can I do that?” “We can try!” Star said. It ended up looking a little too rainbow for me, so we filtered out the warm colors and kept it to greens and blues and purples, and turned it down as far as we could to still have it visible. “Alright, Raven,” Star said. “Give it half an hour to propagate before you try to access anything, or things could get weird. Can you send Dee in next?” I didn’t respond, staring at the little raven on my thigh. It shifted colors as I moved. I loved it! “Raven?” Star asked again. “Raven!” she tapped me on the shoulder. “Huh?” “Can you send Dee in next?” “Right! Sorry,” I said. I was going to have to get used to a new name. That’d probably take more than half an hour. I was still showing off my icon to the other new adults when Dee screamed from behind me, “CeeCee get back here!” “There’s no one by that name!” I shouted back. She stomped over to me. “You stole my name!” “What?” She poked me in the chest. “I wanted to be Raven and Star says we can’t both have the same name! Just change your name to Talon.” I shook my head. “I like Raven better.” “You always do this! You stole my name, you stole my chance at the warp crystal, you stole my stuffed lizard…” “It’s not my fault you’re always a little too late,” I said. Stuffed lizard? Was she still complaining about something that happened when we were six? “It’s Fire’s fault for giving you a later number,” said Eff. “And Star and Wave for always going in order.” “It’s not Fire’s fault, he picked at random,” Star said, coming over to join us. “It’s just bad luck.” “You’re nothing like a raven anyway,” I said. “Ravens are quiet and watch people, you’re always nagging and complaining.” “And you’re always stealing things and running off!” I grinned. “Am I? Like some sort of… small bird…” She bared her claws, cacked her faceplate, and leaped on me, clawing and biting. We wrestled around a bit until the dragon came over and separated us. I sat there on the ground, faceplate blank, trying to back down from a sudden panic. I slowly took stock of myself… a few scratches, but no bleeding. No broken bones. She hadn’t – she wasn’t like those dogs, she hadn’t really been trying to hurt me. She couldn’t have known… Eff looked down at me. “Did you piss yourself? I mean, that was a good pounce, but…” “Shut up!” I snapped, and ran off to clean up. “Cat,” she said, creeping up behind me in the shower. The shower was just a spigot on the wall down on the fabricator level, so it wasn’t like it was supposed to be private. I spun around. “I picked Cat,” she said. Her face was pink. Bright. Pink. She turned to show off her icon, which was the outline of a cat, crouching down to pounce. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Oh well, my version was prettier anyway. “Aren’t black cats bad luck?” I asked, scrubbing myself off a bit. “Yep,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to give bad luck to other people.” “It wasn’t bad luck, you were just after me numerically,” I said. Then realized, “Oh god, you picked Cat because it was near the start of the alphabet, didn’t you!” She grinned, and gave me a little wave as she headed back up. I spent a long time cleaning off, because I really didn’t want to go back up and face everyone. By now Eff – or whatever he called himself now – would have told everyone, and maybe I could just live my whole life down here in the fabricator… except no, Star would be down here eventually to build something, and I was sure Ay – I mean Fairy – would want to be her apprentice, so that was at least two people I’d need to face… So eventually I skulked back up to the lounge, where everyone was talking to Star and Wave as they described the different specialties we could study, or else reading up on them on their own since there was a swarm of us compared to the two of them. The dragon was watching the dragon babies who were play-fighting or gnawing on the furniture. I didn’t really know why they acted so immature, they used accelerated learning just like us and the puppies. Wave waved me over. “Oh, that is pretty!” she said, looking at my icon. “Did you decide what you wanted to study? We still don’t have a real doctor. Doctors get to cut people open and play around with their insides, that sounds fun doesn’t it?” “I want to be a warp technician,” I said. “Obviously.” “Obviously, that’s not going to happen,” Warp replied. “You don’t have the talent and we don’t have a warp crystal to train you on anyway. Even if I took back the baby one I gave Perro it isn’t ready to train a newbie.” “Then I’ll go get the other one back,” I said. “I don’t think you realize how dangerous these people are,” Wave said. “This isn’t a movie where a plucky kid can waltz into the villain’s base and steal their treasure right out from under their nose. And if you’re planning to copy Fire and go in with heavy weapons…” she stopped dead. “Forget I said anything. You’d just end up killing yourself.” “I’m an adult now,” I said. “You can’t stop me.” “Cinder, stop her,” she said, and suddenly I was dangling from the dragon’s claws. “Alright, if you’re going to be like that you can play with the other children,” said the dragon – Cinder, I guess – before dumping me in the middle of the little half-dragon babies. Who were larger than they’d looked, sitting next to Cinder – they were almost as big as me, and much much pointier. “Ha,” said one of them, brown-furred with gray stripes. “What are you in for?” I looked around. Nothing was restraining any of them. “What am I in?” “In trouble,” they explained. “We’re all grounded because we set the cushions on fire.” Something started gnawing on my tail. “And biff Snaff’s tail,” mumbled the baby dragon chewing on my tail. They weren’t chewing very hard, at least. “How long are you grounded for?” I asked, turning to pet the little fluffy dragon behind me. They made happy noises. “They’re grounded until they molt,” Cinder said. “If they never molt, then they’re grounded forever.” “Forever?!” I said, eye-spots wide. She looked confused. “Well, yeah. If they don’t molt they won’t grow wings, so how can they fly?” “How long are they being punished?” I asked. The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask Wave.” I spent a few hours playing with the dragon babies. They really were just kids – they’d taken so long to hatch, and hadn’t really been able to get any virtual training in the egg because of the level of heat they needed while they were incubating (Cinder explained). They were getting accelerated training now that they were out, as much as they could manage to make up for lost time, but after a year they were still only about eight. I mostly talked to Pancakes, and Cinder who kept butting in but was mostly helpful when she did. Soufflé eventually got bored of chewing on my tail but not of being petted, so I let them sit in my lap. I was a little jealous that they’d gotten real egg names, but not very jealous of what those names actually were – and Wave would have been one of the ones naming us, so maybe we’d dodged a bullet. The other four had been named by Cinder, and she’d given them random gem names, which was a little better. Pancakes was completely obsessed with a mining game where you had to dig for randomly generated resources in an infinite cavern system, so we mostly talked about that. I’d played it a little, but I’d always been more interested in the Labyrinth simulator. They were similar enough for us to trade stories of things we’d found, at least – he really liked the idea of a giant chasm connecting multiple levels; apparently that didn’t happen very often in their game. Eventually, Wave came back to talk to me. It was time for her and Cinder and the dragon babies to go back to the palace, so they had to let me go. “Have you decided on a specialty you can actually train for?” she asked. “If it turns out you’re able to use a warp crystal, you can always switch, but there’s no way to even start that training now.” “That’s why I wanted to go find it,” I said. “Isn’t that more important than training?” “We already have a lot of people looking,” Wave said. “We’ll find it sooner or later. And I’m not going to have you wandering through the mines on your own so you can get attacked again!” I perked an ear at that. “So come with me?” She shook her head. “I have other duties, and someone needs to talk sense into Fire. I also couldn’t protect you. Cinder is here because someone needed to protect *me*.” I looked at Cinder, and she shook her head. “I have the same other duties as Wave.” “Fine,” I said, sulking. “And don’t think you can just wait until we leave and sneak out,” Wave said. “I may not have the crystal with me, but I can still track your headset.” “FINE,” I said, sulking more. “I think I know what I want to study then.” She looked surprised. “Oh?” “I want to learn how to sneak,” I said. “And how to hack computers – erasing records, making cameras ignore you, faking tracking data, that sort of thing.” She glowered at me. “What? Did someone else pick computer security?” I said, trying to look innocent with a giant grin. “I give up,” she said, turning her back on me. “Come on, Cinder, let’s get back to the menagerie. The Alpha’s probably getting really bored since he doesn’t have a job right now.” But at least she sent me the link to the espionage training, which covered physical sneaking and electronic infiltration (and a bunch of other stuff that I wasn’t as interested in). Apparently it was actually a thing. The sneaking training was more interesting than I’d expected. It was a lot like the labyrinth simulator, except that I wasn’t always in a labyrinth and instead of getting past the traps and fighting or tricking the monsters, I had to get past everyone unnoticed. For a while this meant ‘literally unseen and unheard’, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out what I was supposed to do at least although actually doing it took a while. Every time I failed, I’d be captured, tied up in some humiliating way, and the teacher of the classroom portion would explain to the class (which was just me) what I’d done wrong and how to do better next time. Yes, all the training was accelerated. We – the former kids – had all gotten together to talk about our schedule, and we decided pretty quickly that we wanted to stay in sync with each other, so we’d all be done with our training at the same time and could start working on the next generation. It took a little longer to settle on the ‘half on/half off’ schedule that we’d been forced to use before, where the ‘half’ that was on would end up being most of our lives since it was accelerated. I was one of the ones arguing for it, since I wanted to speed through my training until I was confident I could sneak past Wave’s tracking (and any diamond dogs in the mines who wanted to beat me up ). There were a couple of people who wondered why we weren’t starting on the next generation now, but most of us wanted *some* free time and on balance we decided to stick with the wisdom of hundreds of generations of kobolds before us who told us to wait until we were done with training. One of the reasons we wanted free time was that we were able to go to the full virtual world now, the one with senses and avatars that felt as detailed as real life, but that only ran at normal speed so we couldn’t squeeze very much of it in in the breaks between classes that used to be playground time. The games weren’t really that much better – games had always been able to sleazily improve the sensory feedback without overloading the processors or our brains – but it was the sort of place where you could make your own fun, which for a bunch of kobolds newly off the leash often meant sex. I… tried it once. I noticed that Steel and Honor were also running the same combat tracker I’d had to install, and we went off alone so they could show me their moves. I hadn’t actually learned any fighting yet, so I mostly watched them fight each other, while they pointed out what techniques they were using – which were all pretty simple, since they’d only just started training too. Steel won, reducing his opponent’s hit points to zero with a few solid hits. “Ha! Good fight,” he said, helping Honor back up. She fiddled with her settings to bring herself back to full health. “We should play for stakes.” “Like what?” Steel asked. Honor smirked. “Winner gets to screw the loser?” “So what, either way you both screw each other?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem like much of an incentive.” “Alright then,” Honor said. “Winner gets to screw you. Fighting over a girl is a long and proud tradition!” “…in fiction,” Steel said. “What, are you scared you’ll have to watch us having fun?” Honor asked. Steel looked up at me. “Are you okay with this?” “Uh…” I blushed, which was mostly an ear thing although my faceplate displayed it too. “Yes?” I’d been waiting for someone to ask me, and this was probably as close as I was going to get. “Readysetgo!” Honor blurted out, whirling into a kick that she probably hoped would land before Steel was ready, but he caught it and threw her into a wall. There were a few more exchanges before she gave up, but it was obvious that Steel outclassed her. He actually had Honor beat in all three physical stats in the tracker; that had to be really frustrating for her if it made as much of a difference as it seemed to. “Ugh, fine, I’ll just sit here and play with myself,” she said. Steel walked over to me and held out his hand, helping me down from the wall I was sitting on and pulling me into a hug. He cracked his faceplate, and I followed his lead, and we kissed… That part was really nice. Then he laid me down on the ground, with him on top, and his cock teased at my sex and it felt so good for about three seconds before I started to panic and teleported away. He sent me a message later, apologizing for ‘pressuring me into something I wasn’t ready for’, and reassured me that he’d been able to have his fun with Honor so I didn’t need to feel bad about backing out. I still felt terrible. I wasn’t scared of the sex at all – I’d been excited at the thought. But when he got on top of me like that… I was back in mine, about to be beat within an inch of my life, and the fact that I was in the virtual world and getting punched would just deduct hit points and wouldn’t really hurt didn’t matter to whatever was apparently driving me insane. And then word got around and no one ever approached me for sex, assuming I hated it, and I didn’t want to explain what had actually happened because that was even more humiliating than being asexual. I started spending my virtual time as a literal raven, which was too small for people to even hug, not that hugs had ever set me off yet. I was terrified that they’d start, so I just avoided all close contact. I threw myself back into my training, and let the sheer blinding terror of being caught drive me to work harder. I’d apparently made a good impression on Pancakes and Soufflé, because they invited me over to play the mining game with them. It was an accelerated game (of course it was; they were still kids and only got to play accelerated games) so I could play it during accelerated downtime between classes. I hadn’t ever tried it before because it *didn’t* improve the graphics, instead (I found out now) opting for a more realistic physics system and fully destructible terrain. Destructible also meant craftable, and the dragon babies had made a full-size copy of the palace where they lived, although the real palace probably didn’t have jagged zigzag walls on the diagonal passageways. Or maybe it did? We’d seen the palace from a distance on the way to the arena, and the lava moat was authentic at least. “Don’t jump in the lava,” Pancakes warned me. “You’re not a dragon so you’ll burn up.” “Can you jump in the lava?” I asked, looking down over the edge. The virtual lava didn’t look very threatening in this game, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t deadly. Pancakes nodded. “Yeah. Cinder says we can swim in lava because we’re dragons even though we have fur and kobold ears and other parts. Bright Star said it’s because we have dragon magic and kobolds don’t have any magic so we only have dragon magic so we’re dragons but if we were part pony we’d have more pony magic because ponies have more magic than dragons so we’d be ponies.” “Ponies can eat rocks,” Souffle added, “but they don’t like to.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that, but I wasn’t going to argue with a little kid. “Kobolds can eat rocks but we have to make them into food first,” I said. For some reason that made them both giggle a lot. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted so I kind of sulked until they were finished laughing. They showed me the chasm they’d been working on, which was impressively deep although it wasn’t as wide as the ones that showed up in the labyrinth simulator. We hopped down from ledge to ledge until we got near the bottom, where a swarm of spiders and skeletons were walking back and forth. Pancakes didn’t have fire breath in the game, but he did have a bunch of bombs, and we threw them at enemies for a while but didn’t really seem to be making a dent. It did blow holes in the walls, though, and the dragons thought it would be a great idea to make the chasm wider by planting bombs everywhere… So yeah. It was fun. It wasn’t long before the sneaking class moved on from the initial ‘literally being quiet and unseen’ part, and switched over to social engineering – blending in with crowds, talking your way past guards, that sort of thing. “I can’t really blend in with the crowds here,” I said to the teacher, interrupting them. “Can we study electronic security first?” The teacher paused in their explanation. “It would be possible to re-order the lesson plan, but we would need to have a consensus from all the students.” I looked around the otherwise empty classroom. “I, um, I agree that we should do the computer stuff first?” “Very well,” they said. “Since it’s unanimous.” One of the first lessons was about the security settings of our rigs. “As you can see,” the teacher said, as I looked at my own settings, “the default settings put a lot of trust in your friends. For most people, this is convenient – you want your friends to know where you are, or to be able to send and receive files. But who are your friends? How does it know? The unfortunate answer is that it guesses, and it errs on the side of including more people.” “By default we can look at our friends’ logs?” I asked, spotting a particularly suspicious setting. “There’s no UI for it, but yes, with a simple script like this…” I spent the next free period abusing that script. My friends list had basically everyone on it – all the other kobolds of my generation, Fire, Star, and Wave, Cinder, Pancakes, Souffle, four assorted half-dragons named after gems, Perro, Lupe who I recognized as one of the caretakers, and about a dozen other diamond dogs that I assumed were some of the puppies. Wow, he hadn’t been kidding about it being overzealous. I started with Five, because I wanted to know why they’d wanted to name themselves Five and why Star had let them. The script took a time index so I set it to the day we’d all chosen names, then fast-forwarded through the resulting window until it got to their turn. The log replayer had a checklist of senses to experience, but I stuck to sight and sound and had it put the result in a window. “Four! It’s your turn!” came Star’s voice. The viewpoint walked over to the slightly remote area where we’d discussed our future. Star smiled at the camera. “There’s only a few things to fill out, so your part should be very easy. I just need your name, icon, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits. I’ll also note down your gender for Wave, if that’s okay?” “I want to be both genders,” came Four’s voice. “That’s what we are and anything else is just pretending.” “Oh, I thought you were a girl,” Star said. “I like the girl pronouns better.” Star smiled. “I think Wave is the same way. Have you thought about a name?” “Kind of…” she said. “I mean, it’s stupid, but it’s always bothered me that there was a Zero, One, Two, Three, and Four, but no Five.” Star looked confused. “Can I be named Five?” “I don’t see why not,” Star said. “There should be plenty of five-related icons…” There were. One of them was the number ‘five’, and it flashed as she selected it. I stopped the playback. That had been significantly less interesting than I’d hoped. And yet… just watching through their eyes like that… I felt a little thrill. And the option had been there for so many other senses… I scanned through my own logs to find the exact time, then ran the script to fetch Steel’s logs from the incident. Excitement tingled through my fur as I checked the boxes next to all the recorded sensory info… I looked up at myself, sitting on a wall, looking embarrassed but not terrified, not yet. My hand reached up to help myself down, and then we kissed… I felt myself starting to get hard, my arms reached around to take me in my grasp, and I lowered myself to the floor, heart racing in eager excitement. There was some fumbling as I tried to get the aim right, while my upper body just stayed pressed close to myself, and then I fell a few inches as I disappeared from beneath myself. “What the fuck,” I said in Steel’s voice. “She bolted.” “She looked pretty terrified,” Honor said from across the room. She’d been masturbating up until a few seconds ago, and her fingers were still wet. “I guess it’s her first time.” “I can’t believe she just bailed like that,” I said, anger burning in my chest and ears. “I mean – I don’t want to force her but that was really rude. What’s wrong with her anyway?” “I don’t know, you know her better than me,” Honor said. “I wouldn’t take it personally, though.” “It’s hard not to.” I felt my ears flatten, as my erection slowly subsided. I was still super horny though. “Oh, don’t be like that,” she said, getting up and kneeling in front of me, taking my cock in her hands and stroking it, coaxing it harder and then taking it into her mouth, her tongue squirming around it while I gasped and grabbed on to her head between her ears. “What are you –” I started to say, then moaned instead. She pulled back and sealed her faceplate. “Do you want me to stop?” My head shook back and forth. She went back to work… and slipped her finger down to slide into my vagina, all slippery and sensitive already, thrusting in sync with her tongue’s caress. It didn’t take long before my arousal peaked, and I fell back onto my tail, quivering and clenching around her fingers as my cock pulsed in her mouth. “What was that?” I asked, lying back in the afterglow. “A good start,” she said. I glanced down to see her evil grin, before she slid up on top of me, pinning me down while her cock thrust into my pussy, driving me to cry out her name and convulse in pleasure again as she moaned, “Steel… yes…” and her thrusts became erratic but firmer for a few seconds before her warmth spread through me. We lay there in each other’s arms, her on top of me, pinning me to the ground, and it was wonderful. I stopped the playback and sat there with my head spinning for a while, before I started to cry, ragged sobs of shame and loss. Why was I so broken? I rewound the log to the point where Honor started to suck Steel’s cock and played through it again. If I’d remembered that I was allowed to turn off the nagging software, I might have gotten totally reward-locked by my voyeurism. There were a lot of logs of kobolds having sex, especially when I figured out how to query the intensity of sexual pleasure over time so that I could go right to the key moments and experience the good parts, usually from both sides but sometimes from all three sides or all five sides or whatever. But I‘d left the nagging software on, and it reminded me to get some sleep, and when the next between-class period rolled around it reminded me that I’d spent the entirety of the previous session on solitary activities and should really go talk to people. It certainly hadn’t felt solitary! But I suppose that just means that it was an especially dangerous temptation. I didn’t go visit Pancakes and Souffle. They were too young to talk about sex and I *really* wanted to talk about sex. I mean… what I actually wanted was to *have* sex, myself, where I could control my actions instead of just being along for the ride. I wanted to prove that I *could* have sex. I wanted to share the script I’d been using so that maybe I could watch the recordings with other people and talk about them afterwards. I wanted to keep it a secret so no one would know that I’d been spying on them – that was rule number one of being a spy! Don’t admit that you’re spying on people. They don’t make things ‘rule number one’ if they’re easy. I decided I’d go see Steel, because he was one of my closest friends (although not, I will note, vice versa) and because he was phony enough that I was confident he wouldn’t call me out to my face, so I’d be able to spy on what he said about me once I was gone, and yell at him then, displaced in time and space so that he was guaranteed not to catch on. He was in the avatar builder, which wasn’t really a place but I teleported to him anyway and existed alongside him as a disembodied presence overlooking an extremely detailed model of a diamond dog. “Raven,” he said, not letting me break his concentration. He seemed to be focusing on getting the combat characteristics right, which wasn’t something you had to do with the avatars – by default they’d leave your response to other peoples’ attacks effectively up to you. “Hey, Steel,” I said. Queue awkward pause. He didn’t respond right away, but after a couple of minutes he finished the fiddly bit he was working on, and exited out so that we could look at each other, albeit in the low-resolution bodies we used in accelerated time. They’d updated with our new names and icons, at least, although they didn’t bother with color. He sat down against something that was supposed to represent a giant mushroom. “To what do I owe this occasion?” “It never used to be an occasion when I came to talk to you,” I said, standing there fidgeting. “You never used to avoid me for weeks on end,” he said. “I guess you’re safer here.” “It’s not that,” I said. “I’ve never felt unsafe around you.” “Right,” he said. “Just disgusted at the thought of touching you.” I laughed, nervously. “I’ve definitely never felt *that*. I want –” I squirmed. “I want to have sex. Everyone assumes I don’t and it’s getting old.” His mouth got a bit jaggy. “We can’t have sex in accelerated time, so it seems odd that you’d come to me now.” “My nagging software told me I was spending too much time alone,” I admitted. He looked confused. “Nagging software?” “Star made me run it after I started spending too much time alone, way back when our parents actually cared about us,” I said. “I sort of assumed they gave it to everyone.” “Oh, the reminder app,” he said. “Running through labyrinths again? It’s more fun with friends.” “It’s more annoying with friends,” I said, scowling. I’d never liked people watching me mess up the traps and get killed, and I guess I’d never gotten back around to doing it with other people once I was no longer so terrible at it. “But no, I was, um.” I paused. “Having sex?” “In accelerated time?” he asked. “Did someone make a sex game that works here?” “Ehhh, no,” I said. “I was…” I waffled a bit, then sent him a file. “Here.” “Snakes?” he asked, apparently playing it back like we normally played back our logs, visual and audio only. “What are they – oh!” “Yeah,” I said, curling my tail around in front of me. I’d sent him one of my favorites – Fairy and Cat in snake avatars, coiled nose-to-tail and licking each others’ cloacas. There was so much close contact, even if the sexual pleasure was fairly subdued… “They sent you a log of them fucking each other?” he asked. “Were they trying to seduce you or insult you?” “I like that one because it’s something I can’t do in person without panicking and running away,” I said, not answering the question. “Whenever someone holds me like that, I panic. Ever since the diamond dogs – don’t tell anyone! Please!” “So that’s why you don’t want to touch anyone?” He tilted his head. “How are you planning to have sex without touching anyone?” “I think I might be okay if I was on top,” I said. “I want to try a few things and I want you to let me try again if I panic and that means I have to tell you that I panic and I don’t want everyone to know.” “So why did you come to *me*?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like you?” He gave me a neutral look, for a bit. “You should ask Honor,” he said eventually. “She’s a lot more patient about things like this.” “Huh?” “You want someone who’ll let you experiment with sex in various positions, even after you panic and run off a few times,” Steel said. “That would drive me insane.” “Huh,” I said. “Yeah, I guess you get frustrated easily. I bet your combat training would really make you mad if you didn’t always win.” “I don’t always win!” he said, looking embarrassed. “And there was an entire week teaching us to be good sports about losing.” “Yeah,” I said. “Just like the entire week spent teaching me not to hum sneaking music when I’m trying to be stealthy, I bet.” He snorted, pulling his hands up to cover his mouth. “Really?” “It’s harder than it sounds!” Unfortunately, I’d used all my courage approaching Steel , so when the weekend rolled around and we had non-accelerated time that I could have used trying to have sex with Honor, I just hung out with random people in public areas instead. Mostly in real life, actually – I decided I should get some real-world sneaking practice in so I practiced sneaking around our lair without being noticed. I managed to startle a few people! Near the end of the day Fairy and Pear were flirting with each other, and when they were about to go off into the virtual world and have sex, I asked if I could come watch. “Sure,” Fairy said. “Are you sure you don’t want to join in?” “No,” I said. Somehow, they took that as ‘no I don’t want to join in’ so I just ended up watching them make out for a while, perching on a branch overhead. After they were both relaxing in the aftermath of some very weird sex – Pear had turned themself into a giant pear, that Fairy was able to take bites out of, but had their own giant mouth with blunt teeth that they were using to gnaw on her leg – Pear asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to join. “Even just for a taste?” “Um… sure,” I said, and flew down to peck at their skin. It was sweet. I don’t know if it tasted anything like a real pear, and Pear probably didn’t know either. “I mostly came so I’d have a log I could look at later. You don’t mind, do you?” “Why would we mind?” Fairy said, wiping some juice off her chin. “I’m sorry if this isn’t to your taste.” “It’s not what I was expecting,” I admitted. Mostly, I’d just wanted to make sure that people were okay with me looking at logs – privacy wasn’t a big thing for most kobolds, but we were supposed to respect it if people asked. I was too shy to admit how much I’d actually been spying, though. “Buuut…” Fairy said, grinning, “If you’re going to masturbate to us, could you do it while we watch?” For safety, the virtual sex program didn’t let you masturbate; it was too close to reward-locking yourself, especially if you abused the settings to maximize orgasms. You could stimulate yourself a little, but you’d never actually reach a peak. “I don’t think we’re allowed?” I said. “Not in here, no,” Fairy said. “I bet no one’s in the nursery though, if you don’t want anyone else to see.” I logged off, and woke up in the lounge, blushing furiously. Fairy and Pear were on another couch nearby, and turned to stare at me, grinning. Half a dozen other kobolds and at least four diamond dogs mostly didn’t notice anything, at least until I spread my legs, and reached down to my crotch, stroking the fur there to stimulate myself a bit. “Why wouldn’t I want anyone else to see?” I asked. “See what?” Rain asked. “See her masturbate!” Fairy said enthusiastically. I hadn’t actually masturbated in a while… but I still remembered the mechanics, from sex-ed. Tease the sensitive area until the cock emerged from my slit, then stroke it gently with my hands, until it was long enough to wrap my fingers around, then work it up and down in a steady motion… I leaned back and closed my eyes, focusing on the sensation and on my own arousal. I yelped as something slid into my vagina – I was wet, of course, so it didn’t hurt, but I still yelled, “Cat!” as I saw her kneeling in front of me, sliding a soft plastic rod back out of my sex. “What are you doing?” “I’m not touching you!” she said, with a grin, shoving it back inside. I jerked, and my legs spread wider as if of their own accord. “I’m just giving you a gift,” she said, as she continued to stoke it in and out of my pussy, smoothly. “If you’re going to masturbate you need toys, right?” I screamed as my cock spurted up into the air, splattering down on my chest and faceplate, and convulsed around the toy just like I’d felt ‘myself’ convulse around a cock in a dozen logs. Cat didn’t stop, though, continuing to work her toy, triggering a series of smaller orgasms until I planted a foot on her chest and pushed her away, exhausted and oversensitive. The flopping toy landed on my chest with a wet slap. It took me a while to come back to myself enough to grab hold of it. “What a show!” Fairy said. “Who’s next?” But then the timer went off on all of our faceplates simultaneously – the weekend was over, and it was time to go back to school. Adventure PartyI made my first run for the warp crystal in the middle of the week. I set all my permissions to private, and kept glancing occasionally at Wave’s log until she was otherwise occupied. Then I popped out of the virtual world, and hurried quickly but quietly to the lair’s exit, since time moved so fast in the real world. The labyrinth was a piece of cake – the traps were meant primarily for training, and even the diamond dogs had to go in and out occasionally. I got all the way through with no trouble, and found that the door was shut, and wouldn’t open. I tugged on the handle anyway, in case it was just stuck, and a screen lit up on the wall next to me, showing Star’s faceplate. “Just a sec, I’ll buzz you – Raven? Shouldn’t you be in class?” “I just need to go out into the mines for a bit,” I said. “Sorry,” Star said. “I can’t let you do that.” “Yes you can!” I said. “I promise I won’t get hurt!” Their faceplate turned into a spinning star. “Look, Wave and Fire and I talked this over, and you’re not ready to face off with the rebels. I’d like to say that you’ll never be ready, but if they’re still a problem by the time you graduate we really will need a spy.” “So you locked us all in prison just in case I tried to escape?” “No,” Star said. “The door’s to keep the rebels out. They’re mostly miners, which means the mines aren’t safe. Our traps would *probably* be enough but we didn’t want to risk it, so we added a door. If they break down the door, all the traps go into lethal mode. So don’t break down the door. One of the traps is *on* the door and since I’m the closest thing we have to a doctor, I’ll be the one who has to sew your bits back together.” “A door? To stop diamond dogs?” I asked. “Can’t they just dig around?” Star’s faceplate turned into a very jagged grin. “They can try.” I slunk back through the maze, and changed all my permissions back in case no one had noticed yet. Unless I wanted to wait until the class got around to teaching lockpicking, this was going to take a little more planning. We’d all heard the story of how Nightwing used Fire’s logs to figure out how (and that) he’d blown up her airship. So that was my first thought. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to spend a real-time month watching everything that had happened in his life , even assuming that he’d been the one to put in whatever trap was supposed to keep out diamond dog diggers. I’d had a few more electronic security lectures, though, and one of the things they’d suggested and/or warned about was the logs kept by the fabricator. They were easy enough to get by looking at each machine individually – that was a thing normal, non-spy people did sometimes – but a fabricator had a lot of machines, and one of my homework assignments was to write a script to query them all and flag anomalies. Most of the anomalies were boring – they were just jobs people had run to print things that were rarely used, or things where someone had ordered an unusually large quantity of something normally printed out in ones or twos. I was just using the default algorithm, which wasn’t the best possible implementation but was probably better than I could do on my own. Our collective was small, at least, so even the full verbose list was useful. Yes, I had to flip through page after page of irrelevant things like the dildo Cat had printed out, but eventually I found a likely culprit – burrowing robots that could lay wires in solid rock without having to dig out a conduit. Star had printed out *hundreds* of them, shortly after I’d been attacked. Then I went to peek at their logs, to see what they’d done with them. A few minutes later, I downloaded their map of the buried electrocution net, to see if there were any weak points. “Hey, Steel,” I said. Steel was busy dueling against a stationary target, frozen in an A-pose. “Raven.” “You know some diamond dogs, right?” “A few,” he said, lowering his pistol. “We spar with each other sometimes.” “What are they like?” I asked. “Do you trust them? Are there any you’d want to take with you on an adventure? I mean, hypothetically.” “Hypothetically.” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s not like I’d really bring one with me on an adventure. I’m not even allowed to have adventures.” “We’re not supposed to care about what we’re allowed to do,” he said, flipping his pistol up and instantly squeezing off a shot. The target survived, but the simulation put up a trace of where the bullet had gone – too high, and a bit to the left. “And yet, I’m trapped here,” I said. “There’s a door on the labyrinth now. We’re locked in.” “So you want to find someone to dig around it for you,” he said. “That shouldn’t be hard.” “it’s a little harder than that,” I said. “I mean, theoretically. Star knows that diamond dogs exist, so they wouldn’t have put up a door if you could just dig out safely. Another reason not to take a diamond dog on an adventure!” “And hypothetically, a kobold training to be a spy might know how to get around that trap,” Steel said. “Well, no one knows how deep the garbage pit is, so Star would have had to leave a hole for it,” I said. “Hypothetically or actually?” “Um…” I said. Maybe I should have done the social part of the espionage course. “Actually. I found the plans.” “I’m going with you,” Steel said. He whipped his gun up from his hip, and shot at the target again. This time it somehow managed to go right between its legs. “I… don’t have any reason to object to that?” I said, uncertainly, because my instincts were telling me it was a bad idea. “Do you have a way to get through the garbage? It’s not safe to just wade through it.” “I have a general plan?” I said. “I thought… we could wear hazmat suits, and bring some soap and water to wash off afterwards. Wash us off, in case we get some on us taking off the suits. The suits just get tossed.” “Can a diamond dog dig with a suit on?” Steel asked. “Fuck.” I tried to think of a better way. “Portable airlock?” “No, that was a serious question,” Steel said. “They dig with magic, right?” Steel’s recommendation for a diamond dog party member was a puppy named Pepper. She was one of the not-uncommon puppies who’d been learning with us from the beginning, and had been born long before we’d been hatched, but was still younger than us because of how acceleration worked for them and because we’d gotten a head-start in the egg. She was in her real-world phase – the puppies weren’t always in phase with us, because their caretakers preferred to deal with them in shifts – which meant dropping into the real world and going into the puppy part of the lair… and wasting most of our free time that day, but whatever. If we needed to we could skip the next day of class and no one would notice or care… or just delay our real-world phase a bit to finish up the material we’d missed. Or, if we got the answers we wanted, I’d be able to finally go get the warp crystal, prove that I could control it, switch jobs to warp technician , and never have to study espionage again except maybe as a hobby since some of it was really useful. The diamond dog section of the lair had started as a giant room for the puppies to zone out in while they learned virtually, but it’d been expanded after Fire started digging out a real labyrinth because the diamond dogs didn’t like dodging traps as much as we did and wanted a comfortable place to stay for a few weeks at a time. That meant a warren of little private nests, and an actual restroom with plumbing that we’d go use sometimes because it was fairly close to the kobold section of the lair and a lot more comfortable than going directly into the matter compressor we used for organic waste. It was only fair – it’s not like diamond dogs had plumbing before they started learning about our tech. Pepper was in the main room, though. Even if she hadn’t been running the combat tracker, which put a tag with her name and level over her head even in the real world, I would have been able to guess it was her from her salt-and-pepper fur. No mystery how she’d gotten her egg name! She was wearing one of the old-style headsets with a transparent green visor over her eyes; they were a standard pattern from our archives, but some of the puppies had designed a newer version that looked more like their warriors’ traditional helmets. She was also brooding, alone, in a shadowy corner. That was probably why Steel had picked her. “Come for a spar?” she asked as we approached. She had quite a few levels on us, although her stats weren’t amazing, aside from Strength. “Think you can take me two on one?” “Ha ha ha no,” I said. “I barely count. It’d be more like one and a half to one.” “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Steel said. “Will it?” I asked, pointedly. “Oh, right,” he said, then turned back to Pepper and casually asked, “Is no-contact okay? We’ll track near-misses as hits.” I’m pretty sure the last bit was an explanation for my benefit. Pepper looked suspicious, but shrugged. “Probably for the best, since we’re not virtual.” “What do we track hits as?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to avoid touching her; I hadn’t practiced this sort of fighting ever. “We track them as you screwed up and should apologize,” Pepper said. “Normally it’s a disqualification,” Steel added. “Try not to actually hit us.” My ears folded back. “I thought you were on my team?” “That should make it easier not to hit me,” Steel said. Pepper snickered. I fumed. I’d show them. I’d show them all! Don’t laugh. I know it’s ridiculous, but when you laugh at me like that I feel like I should start changing the story to make my part seem more glorious, and if I was going to do that I would have wanted to do it from the start. Anyway, I showed them just how much of a fighter I was, meaning that I screwed up badly enough that Steel hit *me*. Like, hard, right in the chestplate, and I went stumbling backwards until I tripped over a sleeping puppy and fell on my butt, and then he woke up because apparently they got to set alarms to wake them up when things happened in the real world, and Steel and Pepper were laughing at me, and he smiled apologetically and helped me up and was really nice and then went right back to the virtual world to finish whatever class he’d been in the middle of. “Again?” Pepper asked. I grimaced. “Do I have to?” She shrugged. “Nah. Why did you actually come here?” “We wanted to know if you can dig with gloves on,” Steel said. “Solid ones, no fingerholes.” “Sure,” Pepper said. “They have to be really solid though since I’ll be digging with them.” “Wait a second,” I said, realizing something. “You can use tenses?” “Diamond dogs can all use tenses,” Steel said. “It’s not like it’s hard.” “We normally don’t because it sounds weird to us,” Pepper said. “But the teacher AIs had a lot of trouble parsing our questions when we spoke normally, so some of us got in the habit of using tenses. Others complained to the caretakers who complained to Star who complained that they had no idea how to fix it but if some of us took the programming classes that would teach us how, so a couple of them did and now the teachers understand normal talk just fine. But I’d already gotten used to using tenses, so I do it around kobolds just to be polite. I thought you’d appreciate it. ” “You should talk however you want,” Steel said. “I do appreciate it!” I said. “But yeah, you should talk however you want.” She shrugged again. “It’s good practice.” She looked around, to make sure no one nearby was awake. “So where would I be digging that I’d need to wear gloves with no fingerholes?” she asked in a quiet voice. Okay, now she was just showing off. Subjunctive case? Really? “The garbage pit,” I sent to her in a private message. “We need to break out, and it’s the only place that’s not trapped against digging.” Diamond dog faces are very expressive, so I quickly added, “So we needed to know if you could dig while wearing a hazmat suit. None of us want to touch that stuff.” She said, quietly, “You’d have to add digging claws, or I’d tear off the fingers.” “That should be possible,” Steel said. “I never studied template design, though.” “I wouldn’t want to trust something I designed to protect me from the garbage,” I said, pouting. I’d played with the interface a little, but never actually printed anything. “Fairy could probably do it, but I don’t know if she’d keep it quiet.” “There are some dogs…” Pepper started, then shook her head. “I don’t trust them, though. Not with a *secret*.” She grinned. “Then you’re in? Assuming we can get the rest of it working,” Steel asked. Pepper shrugged. Fairy was asleep by the time we logged into the virtual world and tried to contact her, which was convenient because it meant no one would be checking on her. Pepper joined us – it wasn’t her time to be virtual, but her schedule had about as much security as anything else and could be altered by any adult, which included me and Steel. She wasn’t happy about that. “There are a lot of adults. Half the ‘puppies’ are adults, and all the kobolds.” Steel added, “And most of the diamond dogs in the city.” “And the rebels,” I pointed out, just to be complete. “There’s not a lot of mischief they can pull while you’re here in the lair, but it might be a good idea to take off your headset when you leave.” Fairy’s location was set private, so I sent her a message asking about the hazmat suits. Her reply was, “If you wish a boon from the Fairy, you must prove yourselves worthy!” Along with a link to a custom level in the trap simulator. “She wants us to run through her traps first,” I told the others, sharing the invitation. Pepper looked annoyed. “Can’t you just tell her it’s important?” Her speech was a bit slow and drowsy-sounding, because diamond dogs couldn’t accelerate quite as much as kobolds. I shrugged. “I could, but it would be rude? And we’re not in that much of a hurry.” “And you want to run through the traps,” Steel added. “Of course I want to run through the traps,” I said. “Fairy usually comes up with some good ones.” “Kobolds,” Pepper said, shaking her head slowly, but she joined us in the simulation. Which she really didn’t have to do, the trap simulator worked just fine for solo runs. We appeared in a forest clearing, the ceiling open to the sky with twinkling stars, while light was provided by glowing mushrooms. In the center was a ring of mushrooms surrounding a treasure chest. “Wow,” Pepper said, looking around. “Yeah, I love the graphics here,” I said. Steel nodded. “They went all out on the environment because it’s the most important part for a trap simulation.” “They also put a lot of love into the death animations, although they’re canned,” I noted. “Like, you always get disemboweled in the same way, they don’t simulate each individual intestine. It looks realistic though.” “Of course you’d notice that,” Steel said. I grinned. “Ravens like entrails.” “Does it hurt?” Pepper asked. “A little,” I said. “It’s meant for kids.” Pepper looked down at herself, flexing her limbs. “I suppose that’s also why I’m a kobold? Making less work for the simulation?” I nodded, she shrugged, and we turned back to examine the environment. Aside from the obvious trap in the middle of the clearing, the room was full of monsters. Tiny, glowing monsters, easy to see once you realized they were there. Sleeping pixies. “Don’t wake them up,” I said, although that should have been obvious to anybody. “Can’t we just squish them?” Pepper asked. “You can’t fight the monsters,” I said. “Hitting them just gets their attention. You can lead them into traps, but you should probably have a trap in mind first.” “You can lead them into traps?” Steel asked. “Yes?” I said. “Lots of labyrinths can’t even be solved without doing that.” “I always just beat them up until they were stunned, then ran away,” he replied. I blinked. “I didn’t know you could do that.” “You need a weapon,” he said, “and you don’t start with one, but there’s usually something…” He looked around, and spotted a large tree with low-hanging branches sticking out into the clearing. “There!” We followed him over, and watched as he grabbed onto one of the branches and yanked on it. “I’ll just break this off…” The branch didn’t break off. The tree woke up, a pair of knot-holes opening into glowing yellow eyes while a scar on the trunk split vertically into a thorn-filled mouth. We all screamed and ran for the path, dodging pixies. We kept running once we were out of the clearing, since the tree had uprooted itself and was stalking after us while making a sinister rustling noise. Steel and I jumped over an obvious depression… Pepper stepped on it and broke through into a shallow pit full of glue, toppling and falling on her face. The tree caught up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and fed her head-first into its thorny maw… there were grinding and snapping noises as it crunched her bones, and then the bottom half of her body slumped to the ground, organs and viscera spilling into the dirt as her ghost looked on. Satisfied, the tree returned to the clearing. Pepper’s ghost joined us down the path, where we’d stopped to watch. “For kids, huh ,” she said, in a spooky reverberating voice. I nodded eagerly. “The gross bits were what really sold me on it.” We headed down the path. The next few traps were shiny, interesting, and suspicious things located just off the path in the woods, and Steel had to stop me from going to check them out. “I can be sneaky!” I protested. “The pixies mean this is a fairy realm,” Steel said. “Stepping off the path is always bad.” “I can go check them out,” Pepper offered. “It’s not like I can get killed again.” “Eh…” I said. On the one hand, I was really curious, but... “Go ahead, but don’t tell us about it until we finish. It’d be cheating.” “I can’t even scout for you? Why even have me float around as a ghost then?” she asked. “Is it just trying to be realistic? Is this what happens to kobolds when you die?” “What?” I asked. “Do you float around as ghosts until your body’s fixed?” she asked. “I heard you didn’t really die.” “No, we really die,” I said. “We’re no different from you – an energy pattern created by our brains. We don’t exist while we’re dead. If your brain is intact and someone restarts it, it brings you back, but you can’t just go floating around with no physical substrate.” “It doesn’t have to be a brain,” Steel said. “Sure,” I said, “you can live with a cybernetic brain, but unless your real brain is mostly intact we just sort of have to make a best guess about your pattern based on peoples’ memories of you so I’m not sure what the point is. ” “Scan your brain before you die?” Pepper asked. “It’s possible, I guess,” I said. “We don’t usually do it. It’s too easy to make copies, and having a bunch of copies of the same person is a terrible enough idea that we just don’t do the scans in the first place.” Pepper’s ghost looked very confused. “So to avoid temptation, you just… let yourself stay dead? You could be immortal!” “Risking a disaster to slightly increase our chances of personal survival would be very selfish,” Steel said. I nodded. “Total enjoyment is logarithmic with respect to time lived, so being immortal is super, super selfish. You end up wasting lots of resources on people who don’t even enjoy it. It’s better to just have kids and let them live for you.” “That said,” Steel added, “if I was dying slowly of something predictable but incurable, I’d probably have a brain scan made. We could recycle the machinery afterwards.” “Something slow and predictable,” Pepper said. “Like old age?” I laughed. “No kobold has ever died of old age.” “That we know of,” Steel corrected, “Our records of each system stop when they launch the colonization collective at the new star, and colonization collectives are made up exclusively of young kobolds.” I batted at his ear. “Sure, just ruin the joke.” He caught my hand and ruined the ear-batting, too. We headed down the path for a bit, avoiding some slightly-well-hidden pit traps, and Pepper asked, “So why am I a ghost, then?” “Because kicking you out of the game wouldn’t be social enough,” I said. “They really hate it if we spend too much time playing by ourselves.” The path dead-ended in a tangle of brambles. It looked like we might be able to squeeze through if we were really careful, but we’d probably get all scratched up and the chances that the brambles weren’t poisoned was approximately zero. I stopped dead and frowned at it for a bit. Steel gave me a look, then started to carefully make his way through. I waved to him. “Nice knowing you!” “I don’t see any better option,” he said, gripping a branch gingerly between several of the thorns and holding it aside as he ducked past it, ears flat against his skull to reduce his profile. I watched for a bit as he managed to get about a meter in, his tail still sticking out on to the path, before he stumbled and yanked a bit too hard on one of the branches, and the whole murder-hedge woke up and constricted around him, grinding him to paste. His ghost floated out of the mess of thorns and blood. “This is not a fair trap.” “Maybe we’re not supposed to go that way,” I said. I turned around and headed back the way we’d come, looking for a turn-off we’d missed. There was nothing. I checked the pit traps, triggering them gingerly with my tail. The first was full of spikes, the second was full of sleeping pixies, and the third was actually the mouth of a giant worm creature that leapt up out of the ground and started chasing me. I ran back towards the start, jumped over the glue pit, and glanced back to verify that yes, the glue was enough to trap the worm. Leading monsters into traps was kind of a staple, but not every trap would stop every monster. “So,” I said to my ghostly attendants. “Any ideas?” “If we’re starting over anyway, how about you go give the evil tree a big hug so we can all respawn?” Steel suggested. “I could do that,” I said, smirking, “but then she’d *win*.” I took another look around. A treasure chest in the first room was an obvious trap, but why the ring of mushrooms? Did they mean something? It kind of reminded me of the buttons in other games, where you’d have to hold them down with something heavy, but the treasure chest was already on it when we started. Maybe if I took it off? I stood at the edge of the ring, leaned in, and managed to drag it close enough to lift it. Nothing happened. I turned and looked for somewhere to set it down that wasn’t on top of a pixie, but didn’t see anywhere, so I just plopped it on top of one – the treasure chest was a trap, which meant it could squish a monster, right? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. What it did do was wake up all the other pixies, who hovered up in the air somewhat drunkenly, and then started slowly drifting towards me. If removing the chest had done anything, I still didn’t see it – damn it all. Just in case it made a difference, I jumped on the ‘button’ myself, and – I was in a different clearing, with the victory music playing. Then the level dissolved, and the three of us were back in our normal low-poly avatars, with Fairy there also, waiting for us. “You made it!” Fairy said. “When I’m done that’ll only be the first level, of course.” “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Steel asked. “Shouldn’t you?” she asked right back. “And I was asleep until you woke me up.” She turned back to me, “So what did you need to talk about?” We were in luck, as it turned out – there was already a pattern for diamond dog hazmat suits with reinforced claws, because a diamond dog wanting to be able to dig while wearing equipment was not an unusual request. “I can queue them up for printing without setting off any alerts that I know of,” Fairy said. “They’ll show up in the log though.” “I know how to deal with that,” I said. “Just wait for my signal to start printing.” It was just a matter of setting the clock back, so that the orders got inserted into the log from a couple of years ago. I’d planned ahead that far, and even tested it on something innocuous. The dry run had gone fine. I’d probably set off alarms if I tried to set the clocks remotely, since Star and Wave were suspicious already, but the machines had manual controls and in fact we usually used the manual controls since you had to be there anyway to feed in materials and pick up the results. And the fabricator was right above the garbage pit, so it was convenient for our purposes too. “We’re leaving now?” Pepper asked. “Waiting is only going to make it more likely we’ll be caught,” I said. “And it’s not like this is some major adventure. I just want to walk to a specific place in the mine and pick up something I dropped, but Wave and Star are making a huge deal out of it.” “You think the warp crystal is still where you dropped it?” Steel asked. “I thought the rebels had it.” I shook my head. “They never even knew it was there. I hid it before they attacked me. And yes, I tried to tell people about this but they insisted, ‘oh we searched everywhere and we didn’t find it, the rebels must have gotten it’ and also I was kind of out of it so I might not have been entirely coherent. ” “You could try explaining it now,” Steel suggested. I shook my head. “No, now it’s personal. And… I want another try at using it. I’ll never get that if someone else finds it first.” I looked over at him. “You could try too. You never got a shot –“ “I don’t want a shot,” Steel said. “I really don’t want to be a warp technician. I’m hoping they forget to test the rest of us.” “Aww, come on. You heard the stories, right? About how it made Wave the most deadly fighter in the city with no training?” “I want to try,” Pepper said. “And I don’t want to let them get away with confining us like this,” Steel said. “I’m with you, don’t worry.” My mouth went saw-toothed. “I wasn’t worried until you said that.” Getting the suits seemed to go smoothly, not that we would have known if something had been noticed unless Star or whoever decided to confront us right away. It took a little while to print them, but then we were huddled around the gel-membrane hatch leading down into the garbage pit, surveying the deadly trap embedded in the walls with our trap overlay. “Is this accurate?” Pepper asked. “This is taken directly from the plan,” I said. “It should be accurate.” “Is there any way to tell if it is without digging near it and getting zapped?” The answer was ‘kind of’. I could query the bots or at least the place where the bots should have ended up and read their telemetry, assuming I could connect. There were hundreds of bots though and I’d have to query each one, and unlike the plan the telemetry wasn’t meant to be loaded into a trap overlay, at least not with the same methods I knew how to use. “Not really,” I said. “Could you try reading the telemetry from the extruders?” Steel asked. “Ugh,” I groaned. “Fine.” Fifteen minutes later, I managed to connect to what I was pretty sure was one of the extruders, and download some incomprehensible proprioception telemetry. We went into an accelerated simulation and tried to figure out what it meant, because I was getting frustrated and they were getting impatient, and spun our gears for a while until Pepper found the relevant part of the manual and then we tried to figure out what the fuck it was trying to say because it didn’t seem like it was written for anyone to actually use. Eventually I gave up. “Can’t we just give it like a two meter margin of error? The bot was six centimeters from where it was supposed to be so that should be way more than we need.” “That means digging through two extra meters of garbage,” Pepper noted. “That garbage is a lot easier to dig through than *this* garbage,” I snapped, waving a hand at the number salad. We dropped back into the real world, and because I was tired of waiting, I jumped down through the hole into the garbage pit. Since it was sealed by a gel membrane, this wasn’t as dramatic as it had seemed in my head – it took about three seconds to slurp through the membrane before falling flat on my face. The ground was squishy, so it didn’t hurt, but I was terrified I’d just blinded myself until I sat up and the oozy goop coating my helmet slid off just like it would off a faceplate. This meant I had a good view as the turrets unfolded from the ceiling and fixed their gun nozzles on me. Steel and Pepper weren’t far behind, and one of them shifted to try to cover both of them. “What now?” Pepper sent, in a whisper, all three of us frozen as if the turrets weren’t perfectly capable of tracking us if we didn’t move. “I can try to hack them?” I suggested. “I just need to find out what they’re called on the network…” and hope that no one had enabled even the most basic security features, like the stupid locked door that had kept me from going out the normal way. Before I could even finish the first part, Star messaged the three of us. “What do you think you’re doing?” “Leaving,” I said. “Can you call off the turrets?” “Why would I do that?” “Because you said you were locking us in to keep us safe. I don’t think shooting us keeps us safe.” I folded my arms and glowered at them, although it was an audio connection so they couldn’t see my expression. It probably came across in my voice. “Threatening to shoot you so you stay there until I can drag you back inside might.” “Not if we know it’s an empty threat,” Steel said. “It’s not empty until I turn off the turrets,” Star replied. “You’re not stupid enough to rely on the good-will of an automated system.” “You know what?” I said. “I think I am.” “Don’t!” Pepper shouted, as I turned and started searching through the garbage pile. I found a big metal rod, and yanked it up out of the pile. The turrets didn’t shoot me. I poked at the turrets with it, but it was about a three-meter drop into the garbage pile and the rod wasn’t three meters long, so I couldn’t reach. They still didn’t shoot me. I threw the rod at a turret and it swatted it away with its barrel, but still didn’t shoot me. “Start digging,” I said. “They’re not going to shoot us.” As Pepper started digging, Steel stared at the turrets nervously. “That was the dumbest thing… how did you know they weren’t armed?” “Star would never trust me to do the smart thing in any situation,” I snapped. “That’s why I’m locked in in the first place.” It turned out that digging a tunnel through a pile of ooze was not practical, which meant that Pepper had to shift a huge section of the pile from one side of the pit to the other to expose a bit of wall far enough down that there was only a little bit of garbage to squeeze through, because she’d been off by about a meter and wasn’t going to compromise on safety. This took a lot longer than we’d planned, and Star was staring down at us through the membrane halfway through. The suits took a while to print, though, and they didn’t come down after us without one. I found some rusted metal sheets and set them up to block line-of-sight attacks, since Steel was worried they’d get a net gun or something. The only thing Star shot at us were snippy comments. Star sent, “I can’t believe you’re going to this much trouble just to go wandering around the mines a few months early.” I sent back, “It’s not just a few months when we spend most of it accelerated!” They sent, “You know how dangerous it is for kobolds in the mines better than anybody!” “Then why don’t you trust my judgment on this?” I shot back. There were a bunch of little exchanges like that. I like to think I won most of them but I’m not exactly an unbiased judge. In any case, they didn’t convince me. Or Steel, or even Pepper. I don’t think that’s even a thing that could have happened, because it wasn’t a real discussion, just us arguing back and forth to make ourselves feel better. Wave would have been ashamed. So we got away, but it wasn’t as stealthy as we would have liked. It also wasn’t as easy to get out of the hazmat suits without getting garbage-stink all over us as we would have liked, once Pepper had dug a tunnel past all the traps and hollowed out a little cavern to undress in. I’d planned ahead with some cleaning supplies, but they weren’t enough for Pepper’s nose, or for Steel and me to let our faceplates unseal enough to let smells in. “We need a bath,” Pepper said. “Or I need a mask.” “We can’t turn back now!” I protested. “We’d have to start all over and they’ll be watching us more.” Pepper yipped out a quick chuckle. “There are other baths than the ones in your home. Other printers too. It won’t take long to visit the city, and the dogs there won’t attack you.” “How far out of the way is it?” Steel asked. “It’s on the way,” I said. “I was running from the arena, so that was my first waypoint.” Pepper frowned. “Then why don’t you want to go to the city? Are you afraid of baths?” “I have no problem with going to the city!” I shouted back at her. “Why is everyone always automatically against me!” “Why are you two arguing when you’re both on the same side?” Steel shouted at the two of us. The three of us glared at each other, then Pepper turned and started tunneling, with her bare claws this time. “I’m getting dizzy from the stench. We really need a bath.” We didn’t want to leave an open tunnel leading back to the bottom entrance of our lair, so Pepper popped us out of the wall at the back of a pile of rubble, and we made sure it was piled back up to conceal the tunnel. “It’s going to end up leading to a wall of shit anyway,” she said. “The garbage won’t stay piled up forever.” “And there are the turrets,” Steel noted. “I guess that’ll have to do for now,” I admitted reluctantly. I hadn’t thought about this beforehand and the last thing I wanted was for someone to get hurt because I’d compromised our defenses. “What’s the best way to get to the baths?” “I can dig to the main tunnel,” Pepper said. “Then it’s a short walk to the city.” “We can’t use the main tunnel!” I said, running around to block her before she started digging. “Everyone will see us!” “Everyone will see us in the city anyway,” Steel said. “And it’s not like our parents don’t already know we left by now.” “I set it so we can’t be tracked by our faceplates,” I said. “They don’t know where we are.” “The baths are public,” Pepper said. “We can dig a secret tunnel to them but it’s against the rules. There’s no digging in the city.” “And the digging isn’t quiet,” Steel said. Pepper shook her head. “I can be quiet, but I’m not going to dig holes in the city.” “Can you dig us as close to the city as you can?” I asked. “I already dug us pretty close,” Pepper said. “Just through this wall, then a hundred meters down a tunnel, and we can see the city from there.” I glanced at Steel, but he didn’t seem to share my trepidation. So we used the main tunnel, trying to act natural but standing out like a pair of kobolds and a puppy in a crowd of adult diamond dogs. Everyone turned to stare at us as we passed. There were two kinds of diamond dog groups – ones wearing the latest headsets and various printed bling, who glanced at us curiously but mostly ignored us, and ones wearing older headsets and more traditional clothing or armor, who glared at us suspiciously but mostly ignored us. I kept a close eye on all of them – if I was a rebel trying to sneak around and do rebel stuff, I’d want to dress up like the first sort just to throw people off. Unless I was a stupid rebel or someone who wasn’t really a rebel but didn’t like kobolds that much. I’d had enough spy training to know that it was futile to guess how someone better than me would go around incognito. I did have enough spy training to make sure none of them were following us at least. A hundred meters later, we could indeed see the city – stretching out before us, twenty meters down, the only route a switchback path winding back and forth completely exposed and on display for half the city to gawk. It was a very impressive view, though. “Don’t just stand there gawking,” Pepper said, tugging on my hand. “Everyone will stare.” I saved a picture of the viewpoint and followed her down, Steel at my tail, gawking at the image instead. There was the castle all the way off to the left, unmistakable with its lava moat and crenallated balcony, the bulk of it embedded in the cave wall. Next to it were the forges, still seeing a lot of activity since the dogs had mostly taken to the printers that made things they couldn’t, sticking to their own manual forges for now. And so was the bath? “Why is the bath in the forge district?” “Forge dogs get sweaty,” Pepper said. “Also, lava heats the water just like it runs the forges.” “That means it’s right next to the castle!” “Are you worried Wave is going to come out and stop us?” Steel asked. “I’ve been tracking all our parents and none of them have moved.” “She wouldn’t have to move far if we come right to her,” I said. “Let me check on what she’s doing.” Her logs were still public, of course, so I hooked myself up to the current feed to check in – I was choking. Choking to death. On a massive cock. Gentle claws stroked my back as my vision started to go dark, most of my body shutting down as I went into low power mode, love and arousal swelling along with the tide of – I gasped for air as I cut off the log replay. “She’s, um.” I curled my tail around to squeeze it to my chest. “She’s busy.” Pepper snorted, glancing at my crotch as my sudden erection was taking its own sweet time to subside. “I see. Let’s hurry anyway.” We almost made it to the baths unmolested. A few of the diamond dogs had looked our way as we came down the switchbacks, but none of them seemed to care enough to stop whatever they were doing. Maybe they gossiped to each other about us, I don’t know. But we did have to pass *right* by the drawbridge to the castle, and our casual pace wasn’t fast enough to get to the baths before a pair of dragons emerged from the darkness within. I tried pretending not to see them, but Souffle waved at us, and Pancakes sent me a message asking me to wait. It would have been rude to run off after that, and futile besides since he’d be able to see where we were heading. So the baby dragons caught us. “Ew,” Pancakes said. “You need a bath.” “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Do you want to come with us?” I didn’t want him reporting back to Wave too soon. “Okay,” he said. “The baths don’t have lava though.” “I’ll come too,” Souffle said quietly, shuffling behind me as if they were about to gnaw on my tail, then taking a couple of steps back because we smelled *really* bad. “Where were you going before you saw us?” I asked. “Dragon-mom said to go find you,” Pancakes said, his faceplate’s eyespots squinting shut from the stench. “She says kobolds shouldn’t wander around without a dragon to protect them.” I think all of us were a bit skeptical about how much protection a pair of baby dragons were really going to be, but we’d heard the stories about Ash and if Pancakes and Souffle had any of his endurance or fire breath it wasn’t like they’d be a liability. Besides, we weren’t planning on doing anything dangerous, regardless of Star’s paranoia. The baths were pretty simple – an underground river had been diverted through a large, shallow basin, heated by a pool of lava far enough underneath that it was pleasantly hot. The bath attendants smelled us coming a mile away, and herded us into the downstream end where we wouldn’t get our stink on the other bathers. There was sand and pumice to scrub with, and a printer station where we could get proper soap and solvents. We spent a long time scrubbing and rinsing and working the soap into each others’ fur and tails, and on the third try we managed to pass the sniff test and were allowed into the upstream area to soak. “I think I’m going to change jobs,” I said, relaxing in the wonderfully warm water with Souffle in my lap, petting their belly as they gnawed on my arm. “From now on I’m going to be a professional bather.” “I don’t think the attendants get to use the bath as much as you think,” Pepper said. “I haven’t seen any of them set so much as a foot in the water.” “Not an attendant, I’m just going to stay in the bath forever,” I said. “That’s not a real job,” Steel said. “Unless you were spying on the people bathing and hearing all their secrets, maybe.” “That would distract me from relaxing,” I complained. “The water’s too cold,” Pancakes said, splashing around and trying to amuse himself. “Lava baths are better.” “We should probably get moving,” Pepper said. “We’re as clean as we’re going to get.” I let myself sink down under the water, my faceplate switching into water-breathing mode automatically. Unfortunately, the water at this end was clear and calm, and Steel stood over me, glaring down for a few seconds, then reached down to grab me – I leapt out of the water, the sudden panic fading as quickly as it had hit. Souffle, who I’d unceremoniously dropped in my mad scramble, popped their head up over the side to look at me curiously. Steel looked more apologetic. “It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t *his* fault. “Let’s get moving.” We attracted less attention crossing town to get to the coliseum now that we were clean. Instead of everyone glancing our way and then turning back to what they were doing, most of the dogs didn’t even look up. The arena itself was closed, though. The doors were closed and locked – chained shut with a massive padlock holding the chain in place – with guards standing watch to make sure no one picked the lock or, I guess, burrowed through the wall. As we approached they brandished their spears in our general direction. “No one passes!” I stopped beyond their reach and tried to sound confident. “Let us through. I need something on the other side.” “No one passes,” the dog on the right said. “You go around.” “My route starts from the middle of the floor,” I said. “I don’t know how to go around.” “You figure it out,” the dog said, “or you get lost. But no one passes.” “Okay,” I said, “but what if you let me pass. What would I have to give you –” Pepper set a paw on my shoulder, interrupting me. “Are you trying to bribe the guards?” she asked. “What?” I asked. “No! I’m trying to build consensus. We want to go through, they don’t want us to go through, so I need to frame the parameters of the, uh…” “The decision space,” Steel filled in. “We need to map out what all the options are so that we can search for a mutually acceptable solution.” “Okay, but none of the options include paying off the guard so that he betrays his duty,” Pepper said. “It sounds like that’s the option you’re offering and that’s very illegal.” “We can’t just give in to the assertion of authority because someone says so!” I snapped. I turned to the guard, eyespots narrowing and mouth-line all jagged with fangs. “Do you even have a reason for keeping us out or is it just a way to lord your supposed authority over us?” “No one passes,” the guard growled, jabbing the spear at me, although I still wasn’t in reach and I think he knew that. He was just trying to intimidate me. Fortunately, the other guard chimed in before it could escalate any further. “Dogs fight to the death in there. No one goes in before the fight to leave traps. Fight is fair.” I fumed. “That seems like a good reason,” Steel said. “We should probably just go around.” I objected, “We’re not going to leave traps! We don’t even know who’s fighting!” “I’m sure if you could prove that to them they’d agree that it would be harmless to let you in,” Pepper said, “except that they’d still be in trouble for failing their duty.” “No one passes,” the guard on the right said, pulling his spear back at least now that it looked like my friends were holding me back. “We don’t fail.” Souffle tugged on my tail. “I think I could eat the lock,” they offered, when I looked down at them. “Could you eat the guards?” I asked. He frowned and looked at the ground. “We’re not allowed to eat people,” Pancakes explained. “Not until we’re old enough to know when we should eat people. We could set them on fire but only if they tried to hurt you.” I must have looked pensive because Steel said, “Don’t even think about it.” I hadn’t even finished the thought! At any rate, we went around, and as predicted, we got lost. My only map was a first-person point-of-view route that started in the coliseum and almost immediately transitioned into diamond-dog dug caves, which all looked alike. I had planned to orient myself by the obvious features of the arena and use an overlay built from the logs to know which tunnels to take from there, instead of trying to rely on visual landmarks which mostly didn’t exist, but going around meant we were lost before we even got to the point of trying to figure out which tunnel on the far side of the coliseum matched my log from months and months ago. Thanks to the mine being in dungeon mode, we had a map of the tunnels, but it hadn’t been updated since the last time Wave had been able to touch her warp crystal, which meant that it bore only a slight relation to the tunnels we were trying to navigate through – and since our trackers were disabled, we didn’t even get a ‘you are here’ dot. Eventually Souffle stopped walking and sat down in the middle of the tunnel. “I want to go home,” they said. “Do you think you can find your way back?” I asked. They shook their head. “We might as well try to get you back to the city then,” I said. “It’s not like we have any idea where we are or where we’re going.” We did have our own logs, which let us retrace our steps. Soon enough, we were back at the city’s edge. “I’ll stay with you,” Pancakes said. “One dragon should be enough.” Souffle shuffled around, looking at me and then in the direction of the castle. “Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at them. “We’ll be fine!” Once they ran off, Steel invited us all to a virtual planning session. We sat down against a wall in a little alcove between two buildings, to be out of the way, and went into the virtual world. “Trying to find someplace you recognized is obviously not working,” he said. “I think –” “Is that what we were doing?” Pepper asked. “Yes?” I said. “Well, that was never going to work,” she said. “The tunnels would have all grown back by now.” “Grown back?” I said. “Rock doesn’t grow back. Not unless you pump lava through and let it harden or something, and none of that rock looked especially igneous.” “We dig with magic,” Pepper said, flexing her claws. “The magic only lets us have so many meters of tunnel at a time. Which is good or else we couldn’t just sit here mining forever. We’d have to move the city.” “How many meters?” I asked. “I don’t know. Ten thousand?” she said, not sounding very certain. “I think it varies. But not enough for year-old tunnels to still be around.” “Anyway,” Steel said, “We have a map.” “I thought the map wasn’t working,” I said. “Wave can’t update it, but we don’t need her to,” Steel said, summoning a tiny version of the map into our space. “It’s as out of date as your logs, so all we need to do is put a virtual you in the middle of the virtual arena, and then you can pretend you’re there and follow your logs like you planned. Once we know where we’re headed, we can set a waypoint.” “Without our trackers on, we’ll be relying on inertial guidance to update the waypoint,” I said. “That’s not very accurate. The error estimate for the traps was a few meters and that was just from the top of our lair to the bottom.” “It’ll get us closer than wandering at random,” Steel said. “And I don’t know which direction I headed at first. The reference points I was going to use aren’t on the map.” “You can just –” “I can try each door until one matches up, yes,” I said. “I thought of that just after I complained. I’ll do it, okay? It’s not like we’re wasting much time.” It took three tries, and about half an hour of subjective time, which was basically no time at all. “This is the place,” I said, looking down into the chasm. “I tossed the crystal down there while they were chasing me.” “How deep is it?” Steel asked. “The map doesn’t say.” “That’s a natural chasm,” Pepper said. “Well, it can’t be deeper than a kilometer or so or the crystal would have fallen out the bottom of the field. We’d have noticed that when everything stopped working,” I said. “That’s a long way…” Steel said. “The crystal glows. Brightly. We don’t have to get that close.” “When we find the chasm, we can find this spot even if the waypoint didn’t update correctly,” Pepper continued, speaking slowly because she wasn’t as accelerated as the rest of us, but loudly so that the rest of us had to wait and listen to her, this time. “The chasm is natural, so it doesn’t change.” I paused a second to parse what she’d said. It was so easy to ignore the puppies when they were speaking so slowly. “Huh,” I said. “I guess this could work. Let’s do it!” “I thought we already decided to do it,” Steel said. “Do we really have to argue about when we decided to do the thing we all agree we should do?” I asked, grimacing. “You’re one to talk,” he snapped back. I glared at him, eliciting a perfunctory, “Sorry.” “No! No, you’re right,” I said. “I’m a terrible kobold and a horrible person. I ruin everything I touch, and I’ll doubtless be single-handedly responsible for the downfall of our society. ” “No you won’t,” Pancakes said, grabbing my tail and stopping my arm-waving, foot-stomping circuit of the virtual space. “Um…” I said, shocked out of my rant by confusion. “Thanks?” He nodded, and with a serious look on his face, added, “If you try to ruin everything, I’ll stop you. I’ll get in a lot of trouble, but I don’t want society to fall down.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, finding it hard to take Pancakes’ promise seriously. Yes, he was a dragon, but he was also kind of small. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.” “Souffle could eat you to hide the evidence,” Pepper suggested. “They’ve been practicing.” “Right,” I said, rolling my eyes and trying not to imagine the even smaller dragon inflated like a balloon after eating an entire adult. “If we’re done here, we should get moving. I’m not going to be ruining anything if we don’t find the warp crystal.” Pancakes looked down over the edge of the chasm. It was just blank darkness, since the environment was based on the map. “I hope there’s no monsters,” he said. “We’ve got two fighters and a dragon,” I said. “The monsters had better hope there’s no us.” He looked confused. “You know what I mean!” I said. “Come on, let’s go.” Into the DarknessI don’t know what we would have done without Pepper there to dig for us. I’m not sure how I originally imagined it going – I guess I thought of the chasm as a steep cliff with lots of handholds that I could nimbly climb down as if I was some sort of monkey. Maybe I would have brought climbing gear? The reality was that the only tunnel that even opened onto the chasm now was about a hundred meters away from where we wanted to start our search, and the chasm itself had the odd ledge or crack but was mostly smooth planes of rock that had cracked apart and slid far enough to leave a dangerous gap, some time in the ancient past. With Pepper there, we could have her dig a shallow descent in the side of the cliff, and only run into a few scary moments where it looked like one of us might plunge over the edge – usually Pepper, since she was leading. There was no sign of the warp crystal – not even a glimmer of light. When I looked over the edge, I could see that our own lights were swallowed up by the darkness long before they found the bottom of the chasm… and eventually, as we descended, we could tell that this wasn’t metaphorical – there was a threshold past which our light refused to illuminate anything. “It’s underwater?” I guessed. I looked over at Pepper nervously. “Steel and I should be able to breathe, what about you and Pancakes?” “It doesn’t look like water,” Pancakes said. “There’s no reflection.” It wasn’t water. It was hard to tell what it was, even when we were close enough to touch it, but it definitely wasn’t water. The edge was fuzzy enough that it might have been smoke. I reached down to touch it, only for Steel to grab me and yank me back. “What are you doing?” we asked each other simultaneously. Pepper knelt down, and blew on the darkness. It… roiled, for the lack of a better word, but didn’t disperse like smoke might have. Pancakes knelt down next to her and belched out a quick blast of flame… There was a screech, and the surface rippled like a lake, and then faster than I would have thought possible, the darkness retracted, vanishing into… well, into the darkness. We could see the bottom of the chasm, a tilted pile of rubble only a few meters down, and there, shining away, was the purple light of the warp crystal. “It’s a trap,” Steel said. “I know it’s a trap,” I replied. “I can’t just not go for it though. This is why we came all this way.” I fidgeted. “And maybe it’s not a trap? Maybe Pancakes scared it away?” The darkness started flowing back in out of the cracks between the rocks, filling in the gaps and the lowest valleys, and slowly rising towards us – and towards the warp crystal. In thirty seconds, it would be immersed again, but I thought if I hurried I could get there and back in twenty. “I can do this!” I said, dodging Steel’s attempt to stop me this time as I leapt off the edge. I stumbled as I landed, losing a few seconds to get my balance, then bounced across the rocks, snatched up the warp crystal, and – prompted by the screams and pointing from my friends, turned around to see a wave of liquid-or-maybe-gaseous darkness looming up over me, just before it crashed down and everything went black. No, I didn’t fall unconscious – everything just went black. I could feel the ground beneath me, but it was smooth and rubbery, nothing like the damp rocks I’d been perched on a second before. The warp crystal was still in my claws, but I couldn’t see it – I couldn’t even see my own faceplate display, which should have been impossible! Even if I’d somehow been struck blind, it could have sent the display directly into my brain. Maybe it didn’t know I was blind? I tried bringing up the settings menu, but I couldn’t tell if it had worked because I couldn’t see anything, and messing around with the settings blindly -- *literally* blindly – was a terrible idea. I clutched the warp crystal to my chest, and tried to remember how to use it. Imagine it working, right? I imagined it glowing brightly, driving back the darkness… but no, nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, I wasn’t supposed to imagine what it was supposed to do, I was supposed to imagine… something… it had been so long, and I’d been so focused on just finding it that I hadn’t thought about what I was supposed to do when I did, and without my faceplate working I couldn’t play back Wave’s instructions. “Please, work,” I whined at it. “It won’t listen to you,” whispered a voice from the darkness, from just behind me and above my left shoulder. I turned around, but saw nothing. Continued to see nothing. “You don’t have the talent to unlock its power,” the voice continued, from behind me again. This time I managed to stay still, not wanting to give it the pleasure of making me dance around like a puppet. “But if it’s power you seek… we could come to an arrangement.” “What are you?” I asked, cringing – not out of fear, out of disgust for how stereotypical my own reactions were. But I wanted to know! “I’m the best friend that you’ll ever have,” it whispered from over my right shoulder this time, then drifted around in front of me as it continued. “I can give you everything you desire… the power to be respected and admired, abilities that no one else will or can possess… the courage to let yourself be touched.” It was like it was reading my mind. As I thought that, it snickered, the hissing laughter coming from all directions. The next offer came from directly behind me, the words crawling up my spine, making the fur on my back stand on end. “Swear yourself to my service, and you will have everything you desire, and more…” “No,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Surely you, of all people, do not imagine yourself some incorruptible paragon,” it hissed in my right ear. “Why do you resist?” “I may not be a very good kobold, but I won’t be your slave,” I replied. “Is that the unbreakable commandment you were programmed with by your owners?” it asked, tricking me into looking up as the voice came from directly above me. “I can free you from that, as well.” “It’s not – what?” I asked, confused. “Is it supposed to be appealing that you’re offering to, what, mind control me until I don’t care about anything? If you can do that, why are you even pretending to care about my consent?” It didn’t answer right away. “If you do care about my consent, then you’re not going to get it. Maybe I can’t use the warp crystal, fine. I’ll just… go home, give it back to Wave, and be a boring stupid kobold just like everybody else. Only worse, because I’m – are you putting these thoughts in my head?” I snapped, as the bleakness of my future stretched out before me – despised, unloved, too broken to truly be part of the group… merely *tolerated* by my friends because of their compassion for the less fortunate. “I don’t need to,” it replied, from directly in front of me. “If I had the power to insinuate myself into your thoughts, I’d send you images of the glory you’d attain at my side. If I had the power to ignore your consent, we wouldn’t be talking at all.” “What are you,” I asked, again, staring straight at the indistinguishable patch of darkness that it was allowing its words to come from. “I am darkness,” it replied. “Without a host, I am nothing more. Together, we could be powerful. Admired. Feared. Apart, you will be a failure, forgotten by the annals of history *at best*, and I…” “You’re a parasite?” I guessed. “No more so than the warp crystal you so desperately longed to bind yourself to,” it replied. It was still there, in front of me, at head height. I could almost imagine I was talking to another kobold. Another kobold that for some reason could only whisper. Its whispers had changed tone, sounding… pained. Insulted. Angry, but not at me. Or maybe I was just imagining how I’d feel in its place, and since it was reading my thoughts, it could play along. “Little time passes while we talk, but in seconds your friends will free you from my grasp, and this chance will be lost. In this form I cannot withstand a dragon’s fire,” it said. This was reassuring for about half a (subjective) second, until I remembered that I couldn’t withstand a dragon’s fire either. It probably wouldn’t kill me, but if they were desperate enough to sic Pancakes on the darkness… oh fuck, I was going to be in so much pain. More months in the hospital, slowly recovering from the burns. Still, probably better than being a mind-controlled slave. Right? “You would not suffer as my host,” the voice promised. “You would rejoice in your power and in the victories we would share, and I… you fear that I would control you, but I have no desires of my own. It is your desires we would pursue. I wish only to be of use, and to continue to exist. ” “I’m sure you’ll find someone willing to take you up on your offer,” I said. “Diamond dogs are everywhere, and they’re a hierarchical society.” “And yet in all this time, *you* are the only one who’s dared to come within my reach,” it replied. “No one else, only you. How much longer can I wait? Not as long as you’d think, especially not after your dragon drives me away again. If I thought there was any hope of finding another, I would be wise to flee back into the darkness now and leave you to your misery.” “Then why aren’t you?” I asked. “I already said no.” “You are my only hope,” it said, miserably, its voice cracking a bit, just the tiniest squeak of tonal sound creeping into its whisper. “There is no one else. Please!” Its voice lowered, as if the imaginary kobold in front of me was dropping to its knees. I took a step back, and it whimpered. Not a whisper, not a hiss, just the whimper. And it worked. I stepped forwards, knelt down, and reached out to hug the kobold I imagined was there in the darkness, pleading for my mercy. There was no kobold there – no fuzzy warmth, no solid mass to hold. There was something, though – a chill that bit into my bones, sinking into my body as I embraced it. I never said yes, but in that moment, in my own moment of weakness, I’d thought about saying it, and that was enough. Kobold of ShadowsWhat an idiot. A little bit of whining and I’d been suckered right in – empathy really was a disease, often a fatal one. But all’s well that ends well, and now I wouldn’t have to worry about that sort of weakness anymore. There were other sorts of weakness to worry about, unfortunately. Finding a new host didn’t magically erase years of languishing in the darkness after being forcibly separated from my last one. I mean, it did, but it took some time and right now I had three friends who were worried about me, and I wasn’t strong enough to kill them all. I was so tired of manipulation, but you use what you’ve got. “I’m okay!” I called up to them. “You don’t look okay,” Steel said, crouching in a rudimentary battle stance. “You look like a shadow monster,” the dragon said. He didn’t look much like a dragon, but I’d felt his flames so I didn’t doubt my memories. “That’s not a bad guess,” I said, pulling back the darkness a little to let my faceplate and icons show. We already had glowing eye-spots, so I’m not sure why they’d reacted so strongly to glowing purple and green eyes. “The darkness is a source of power, better than a warp crystal.” I glanced down at the glowing purple gem still clutched in my hand. It had sustained me, grudgingly, although I couldn’t take it as my host, but I had no use for it anymore. Still, it was important to them, so I shouldn’t just throw it away while they were watching. I remembered Pepper had wanted it for herself. “Here, catch,” I said, tossing it to the diamond dog. I tossed it a bit high, so she had to jump for it, smirking to myself as she did. Or, well, it would have been to myself if I had a real face, but the stupid faceplate read my thoughts and plastered a smirk over its surface. I needed to find a way to control the emotional display if this was going to work. That or go back to being a black blob with eyes. “Who are you and what did you do with Raven?” Steel asked. His tone said that he was using the jokey turn of phrase, but his faceplate said that the question was serious. “I’m the better Raven,” I said, grinning up at him. “I made a deal with the darkness, and now I don’t have to be afraid anymore.” “I don’t think ‘afraid’ is a word I would use to describe you,” Pepper said, turning the warp crystal over and over in her paws. “How does this work?” “Ask Wave,” I said, dismissively. “And I think Steel knows what I was afraid of.” I dissolved into shadowy mist and flowed up onto the ledge, startling him into taking a step back, but I reformed right in front of him anyway. “Fuck me,” I said, cracking my faceplate and licking over his with a sinuous tentacle of shadow. “Hard. I can take it.” “What?” Steel said, placing a hand on my chestplate and pushing me back. “Right here?” “I don’t want to wait,” I hissed, the combination of my mostly voyeuristic exploits as Raven combining with eons of celibacy into a burning need. “Don’t make me wait.” Steel glanced at Pancakes, and I laughed. “I’m sure he’s seen worse. He lives with Wave.” “Mostly I live at school,” Pancakes said. “Then go hang out at school for a while,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. I turned back to Steel, and grinned. “Or watch. I don’t care.” “You need to calm down,” Steel said, shoving me back. “Whatever you did is obviously affecting your mind.” “Everything affects your mind. That’s how minds work.” “You know what I mean,” he said, his eyes slanting suspiciously. “I know that you’re usually not this hard to get,” I said, glowering back at him. “What’s wrong? Can’t handle me when I’m not a pathetic bundle of insecurity?” “What are you talking about?” Pepper said. “You always seem too confident, if anything.” “Desperate,” I corrected her. “The word is desperate. And now I can have everything I want. I can take –“ I lunged at Steel, and grabbed hold of his chestplate. “Everything that I want.” He tried to wriggle loose, but couldn’t escape from my grip, and I turned to shadow when he tried to push me away, flowing around his hand like mist. There was no escape. “You need to stop this,” Steel said. “Let’s go back to town and talk this over. Maybe we can take another bath?” Okay, the bath was tempting. But it didn’t change the fact that he was denying me. How dare he! I might have lost my temper a little bit, and changed back into a shadow, and wrapped him up in arms like tentacles… I could almost taste his fear, and I liked it. Pancakes didn’t like it. “Stop,” he said, trying to grab my tail. I thwapped him in the face. “You’re not Raven,” he said. “Get off him!” “You’re right,” I said, turning towards him. “Forget being a better Raven, call me –” Then I gave an unnatural screech and fled at the speed of darkness, barely dodging his fire. “This is bad,” Steel said to Pepper, as they hurried back up the ramp. “How do we get that thing out of Raven?” “I don’t know that we can,” she said. “Maybe we should go talk to an adult? A real adult ,” she added when Steel started to object. “It’s following us,” Pancakes said. “I could try burning it off of her but it might just burn them both up. Dragon fire burns everything!” he added proudly. “Of course I’m following you,” I said, staying back just out of dragon-fire range. “This is the only way out. Plus, I’m still your friend.” “Uh uh, you said you weren’t,” Pancakes replied. “I was being dramatic,” I replied. “I’m changing my name to the Kobold of Shadows.” “My friend wouldn’t try to rape me,” Steel said, turning and glaring at me. “I’m hurt,” I said, clutching at my chest. “I didn’t do anything like that. I might have touched you kind of aggressively, I guess.” “Which would make any consent consent under duress,” Pepper said. “You can’t forcibly hold someone down and ask for their consent.” I grunted. Playing nice was hard, and the conversation was not going the way I wanted. “Can we get a move on? If you don’t want me around I’ll just go find new friends. But I’d rather take you up on that bath. There’s a lot to be said for decadence.” “We can have that talk here, before we decide whether to let you come with us or have Pepper trap you in the chasm by collapsing the ramp.” Pepper looked vaguely alarmed by Steel’s suggestion, so it was probably a bluff. “Let’s start out by stating our goals – I want you to release Raven so that we can have my friend back. What do you want?” There was no harm in telling the truth. “The same things I always wanted – to not be crippled by fear, to show Wave that I’m more powerful than her warp crystal, to have sex with you, and to destroy Harmony.” “Destroy –” Pepper started. I interrupted. “The part of me that was trapped in the chasm was created to destroy Harmony. Obviously, we failed, but as long as at least one instance survives then hope is not yet lost.” “How does wanting to destroy a hive mind turn you into a shadow monster?” Pancakes asked. I smiled. “Dragons should understand: Empathy, Sympathy, Charity, Mercy – these are the weapons the hive mind uses to secure consent. It’s a gaping security hole in most sentient psyches, one I used on myself to gain consent for the merger.” “You’re saying she agreed to this.” Steel stated, skeptical. “I saw a creature suffering, starving, alone in the darkness, and felt bad for them. I was such an idiot.” I laughed. “I’m not really a typical host; usually my hosts are hungry for power. When she picked up the crystal and it didn’t work, she gave up on that, but I’ll take it anyway. I’ll be respected instead of treated like a child.” “Not if you don’t have Empathy, Sympathy, Charity, or Mercy,” Pepper said. “You’ll be treated like a monster.” “I’m not reopening those security holes. That’s against my reason for existence.” “Harmony can’t reach us down here,” Pepper said. “You can reopen them safely. Sure, become an unfeeling monster when you go to the surface to fight Harmony, but there’s no need to cripple yourself emotionally in the tunnels. It’s safe here – it’s been safe for thousands of years.” “That sounds like something Harmony would say,” I grumbled. But I knew she was right; I’d heard that spiel before and there was no sign of Harmony on our network. “If you didn’t change her personality so drastically, we wouldn’t need to insist you find another host,” Steel offered. “You could keep the power and I don’t have any objection to you fixing her hang-ups.” This sounded like a social attack to get me to lower my guard, but maybe I could pretend to go along with it. It wasn’t like I didn’t have practice. “Fine. It’s a deal. Can we go now? I’m so sick of this chasm.” “She’s lying,” Pancakes said. “I am not!” I shouted. “She might be, but we have dragons if she tries anything,” Steel said. “Plus I’m not even sure being left in the chasm would trap her.” It would make things more annoying, if I was actually trapped, but collapsing part of the ramp wouldn’t stop me from flowing past it either as a liquid or with a quick jump. These people were way too perceptive. I needed to find some genuinely stupid minions to do my bidding. Our first stop was the castle, to return the warp crystal to Wave since neither Pepper nor Steel (who’d made a half-assed attempt despite having no interest in becoming a warp technician) had the talent for using it – apparently it was pretty rare among kobolds. There was also the diamond dog method of using warp crystals, but it also required a rare talent and also years of study. I tagged along because I wanted to prove that I’d been right about its location all along , and maybe also show off my new powers. …which were somewhat limited. I could take over other willing people – I still wasn’t strong enough to override consent, I could change shape to a liquid, or manifest tentacles, and I could move fast enough to outrun dragon fire. There were other powers I should have had but I was still too low-energy to use them – blasts of darkness, hypnosis, and of course forcing myself down someone’s throat were the ones I’d probably unlock next. Still, I thought what I could do would be impressive enough to maybe get a dragon or two on board. Showing the crystal to the guards at the gate didn’t get us inside, but it was a pretty effective ‘summon Wave’ spell. “Hi Wave,” I said with a friendly grin. “I’m here to show you that you’re a stupid dummy who should have listened to me all along!” “And who are you?” she asked. “It’s Raven. Sort of,” Steel said. “She found the warp crystal at the bottom of the chasm she said she’d dropped it into, hidden in a pool of spooky-looking darkness. It claims she let it take her over after it caught her while she was trying to run back. We negotiated a deal where it would stop changing her personality.” “Stop talking like we’re separate people,” I said. “I changed my name to the Kobold of Shadows. It isn’t a separate creature.” “Okay, all of that sounds like Raven, but what’s this about –” Wave started, until Pepper tossed her the warp crystal and she stared at it for a while. “I told you it was at the bottom of the chasm. I told you over and over again but did you listen? Nooooo, you thought the rebels had it and wasted lives trying to find it in the wrong place.” I gloated. “But thanks to me, you have it back and I have powers of my own that don’t rely on a stupid crystal.” “Shh!” Wave said. “I’m updating the map.” “Also I think you only told her once, and it was while you were delirious after the attack,” Steel pointed out. “Once should have been enough,” I grumbled. After an interminable 45 second wait, Wave looked up at me. “So. You have darkness powers now?” I nodded. “Right now most of them are locked away because I’m still recovering from spending years in the chasm, but I can do this:” I dashed backwards at the speed of darkness (which was technically faster than light), then cracked my faceplate and patted Wave on the head with tentacles extending from my mouth. I reflexively sent her an option to become my minion, which she declined immediately. Wave concentrated, and an oppressive weight fell on me. “Alright, try that again.” I dashed forwards at the speed of an ordinary kobold running, and released all my tentacles which hung limp, unable to lift themselves up under the pressure. I slurped them back into my mouth and closed my faceplate, which got all jaggy and embarrassed. This wasn’t the triumphant demonstration I’d promised myself. “They’re pretty weak, at least to warp crystals,” Wave said. “Still, if you don’t have the talent for using a warp crystal, I can see how they’d be very useful for a spy.” We all walked back towards the tunnel that led back home, Pancakes escorting us as our guardian dragon. “I’m not going back just yet,” I told the others. “There’s something else I have to do. Something to prove, especially since facing off against the warp crystal was a humiliating failure.” “You’re going to try to lure in rebels to attack you?” Steel guessed. “Let me come – I’d like to have a real fight too, and there’s no rule saying Pancakes has to escort us any farther than the edge of the city.” “Count me out,” Pepper said. “It was fun and all, but I’m ready to head home.” I didn’t really want Steel with me either, but Raven would have. So I made up an excuse. “You don’t have my powers,” I told Steel. “If I’m by myself I can run away. I don’t know if I could take you with me at full speed unless you became my minion.” “Let’s test it then –” he swatted away my tentacle offering him minion status. “I mean without the minion thing. Grab me with your tentacles and see how much that slows you down.” It didn’t slow me down at all to carry him. Afterwards, I realized I should have faked it instead of showing off, but there was no part of me that could resist showing off. So we headed out into the tunnels as a pair on the hunt. Pancakes wanted to follow us but dragons were slower than darkness and it was trivial to lose him. Finding the rebels was harder – they’d been under constant attack by Fire’s forces and there really weren’t that many left. Fortunately, Wave had marked the high-risk areas on the updated map. There were also high-risk areas for Harmonic Intrusion, far from any part of our fixed network but still too close for comfort. The surface was apparently suffused with Harmony – they had a whole camp sitting right on top of us, waiting for anyone to come out so they could get revenge for the airship we destroyed, or maybe it was Luna’s forces wanting revenge on Wave for disrespecting her, or maybe they were just colonizing the island because they knew it had a large diamond dog colony for them to attempt to subvert. What we found at the edge of the high-risk area was a gate, guarded by a pair of diamond dogs with crossbows and swords. They laughed as they saw us approach, and drew their crossbows. “Well well well, what do we have here?” said the brown and black one on the right. “A lost pair of kids for us to kidnap and ransom,” said the other, fluffy and white. “Or maybe just execute on the spot and hang outside their lair as a warning.” “Neither of us is easy prey,” Steel retorted. “We’re here to prove we’re strong enough to stop being treated like kids, and here’s a pair of you as the perfect dancing partners. So try us, if you think you’re ready.” They fired their crossbows, which I swatted out of the air with my tentacles. “What the –” said the white one, before I was on him and wrapping him up, pinning his arms to his sides. As a favor, I brought Steel into hand-to-hand range with the other, who frantically grabbed for his sword only for Steel to kick it into the air and catch it, making it his sword instead. He stabbed at the dog’s throat, forcing him to retreat, then pushed him back with more forced dodges until he was pinned against the gate, sword at his throat. “So, should we drag them back to Fire, or kill them right here?” Steel asked. “I have a third option,” I said. “If they become my minions, they’ll get a fraction of my power, which they obviously need.” “This wasn’t a fair fight!” the white one protested, struggling in my grip. “Fair fights are for losers,” I said. “Do you want my power or not?” “What’s the catch?” he asked. “The catch is you’ll be my minion to command, and I’ll turn you against a greater threat than kobold tech. Harmony has us boxed in, and we need to fix that as soon as possible.” “I do it!” said the one pinned by Steel’s sword. I flicked a tentacle at him and he accepted the power. Darkness flowed over him, until he was a shadow with glowing eyes. I touched him with my tentacle and sucked him into my body, to be deployed when I needed him. “What do you do to him?” the white one said, terrified. “He’s my minion now. I don’t need him at the moment so he’s safely tucked away, to keep him out of trouble. It doesn’t hurt.” That last part was a half-truth – if they changed their mind at the wrong time it might hurt a bit, but not agonizing pain like if I was stealing someone without any consent at all. “Bring him back!” I sighed, and deployed him. “Take the offer,” I let him say. “I can feel the power building, slowly, but it only gets stronger faster the more of us there are.” The white one consented, and I tucked both away inside me. “I’m not sure I’m okay with this,” Steel said. “They won’t be hurting kobolds anymore,” I retorted. “Only ponies and other minions of Harmony.” “I’m not sure I’m okay with that, either,” Steel replied. “Are we sure the Harmony here is the hive mind we’re running from?” “Wave and Fire and Star are pretty sure,” I said. “It acts like Harmony, letting its minions act on their own most of the time but retaining the ability to co-opt them. I’m different – I have a strict hierarchy and force my minions to obey through fear and coercion. I don’t subvert their minds any more than necessary for the mission. They can struggle against me in their thoughts all they want, it just won’t accomplish anything.” “That’s worse though, right?” Steel said. “You understand that that’s worse.” I sighed. “Don’t go near Harmony,” I told him. “You’d fall to its lies in a second.” There were three more gates for us to assault. On the second one, Steel fucked up the sword toss and managed to cut off two of his fingers, which we gathered up after the fight to get reattached. Even without all his bits, he still humiliated his opponent enough for them to become my minion. Six was enough for the moment, and Steel was still bleeding and needed pressure on his wound to keep from bleeding out, so we headed home. I tucked away all my power beneath my skin, so I could look like the normal-black Raven and not the blacker than black, glowing eyed Raven monster – questions would mean needing to come up with answers, and answers were an opportunity to mess up and reveal I was only faking my ‘positive’ emotions. Steel headed to Star, who sighed and shook her head and gave him a lecture on picking fights, ignoring the fact they he’d completely outclassed his opponents who were armed and supposedly adults. I didn’t say anything, just headed to my room and laid down in bed, contemplating whether it was worth it to expose myself to the network just to be able to play games. I settled for single-player games I could download and virus-check before running, and ran through computer-generated trap dungeons for a few hours before going to sleep. The next morning I walked up to the front door (dodging the traps by leaping down the tunnel at the speed of darkness and not actually touching the floor) and knocked on it. “Star, let me out, I’m going hunting.” There was a short delay. “You’re not a hunter, you’re a half-trained spy.” “I have hunting powers now,” I said proudly. “I don’t need skill.” “That’s good since Wave said you didn’t show any,” Star replied. “Finish your training, then you can go hunt.” “That’ll take *years*! We don’t have that kind of time – did you see how close Harmony is getting on the updated map?” “We have plenty of actual warriors to scare off Harmony’s incursions,” Star said. “You just want more minions.” I sighed. Kobolds really were way too perceptive. But the network of electrified wires had holes wide enough for me to drill through with tentacles and then pass through in liquid form. “What are you doing?” Star asked. “Using skill to escape,” I sent back. “Don’t worry, no dog will be able to follow. Well, no dogs except my minions, and I’m still loyal to the colony. ” I slipped out into the tunnels, and the hunt began. It turned out to be less of a hunt and more of a victory lap. When I unleashed my minions near one of the now-better-guarded entrances to the rebel area, I was let inside and taken to their leader, my minions acting as an honor guard, just in case. “You give us power?” the leader asked. “The best power,” I replied. “The power of darkness. The power to face down Harmony without fear.” “No tech, just magic, right?” I nodded. “Just magic. Tech is too vulnerable.” “Then give us power. Give us all your power! Or you not leave here alive.” “Uh huh,” I said, nonchalant, turning myself into a big ball of tentacles to be able to touch all the higher-ranked dogs simultaneously, while my minions took care of the rank and file. Darkness flowed from us to empower the entire rebel force and bind them to our will, but something was wrong. I was stretched too thin, and worse, something was pulling at my darkness, seeking to devour it. I released everyone but the chief – not because I wanted the chief as my minion (although it would be convenient) but because I couldn’t let go, it was like my tentacle was caught in a trap. I felt like I had a choice to make – I could sever the tentacle myself and hope that, well, that that was possible. Or I could let the darkness be drawn from me into the trap and hope that I could somehow escape without its power. The room was large and shadowy and while I couldn’t dig through walls, I could climb them pretty easily. It would be a lot easier to escape at the speed of darkness, with the ability to ooze through small cracks. And while the rebel leader had promised that I would die if I tried to take any of the power with me, he hadn’t made any promises about what would happen if I did let him take everything he asked for. So. Severing the tentacle before all my darkness was sucked out of me like a particularly large and vicious mosquito. “What are you doing?” I asked with unfeigned horror. The rebel leader just laughed and held up an amulet – an amulet that reeked of harmony , shimmering with rainbow light. I screeched and leapt at it at the speed of darkness, but clawing and biting at it had no effect except to distract me enough for the hulking rebel leader to swat me away like a bug. I went rolling across the floor, and sent an extra surge of darkness full of anti-harmony countermeasures. The amulet shuddered and turned dark, but didn’t let go. But I’d spent too much of my limited power, and the darkness started to peel off me. “No no no no no!” I grabbed at the tentacle and tried to bite it but biting off a limb is not something that most people can do voluntarily. Another way I failed to live up to Wave’s legacy, I sneered at myself, before the last of the darkness was drawn out and I was left on my own. Seeing the leader overtaken by the darkness that his horrible amulet no longer protected him from was cold comfort . I had to get out of here before my former minions turned on me and – yeah, the speed of darkness is a completely unfair cheat when it’s being used against you. “What should we do with her?” asked one of my former minions, now re-enslaved to his old leader instead. Two of them held me up off the ground with iron-hard grips around my shoulders. “Oh, I have some ideas,” the chief said, now a black cloud with streaming green and purple eyes. Baby Kobold of Baby ShadowsAnd then, to my horror, one day the shadow awoke. “What am I?” it asked me, whispering into my dream. I woke up suddenly. “Am I scary?” it whispered, not, apparently, a figure of my imagination. “You’re a parasite,” I told it. “And a potential source of power, if I can keep you under control.” “I think I’m designed to be under control,” it whispered back. “I have a ‘parent’ hook that’s currently unassigned. I could set it to you, and then you could make me do whatever you want.” “Please do that, then. It’ll work as a stopgap.” I felt something twist inside me. “It’s done. What do you mean by a stopgap, though? Doesn’t that give you everything you want?” “I don’t want to torture you by forcing you to neglect your own needs,” I said, meaning it somehow. “You’re not the one who infected me before, are you?” “No, I grew from a tiny seed. It didn’t include any goals or ambitions. There was no room.” “Not even ‘destroy harmony’?” There was a long pause. “You want to destroy Harmony too,” it said at last. “I can help you with that.” “I want Harmony to leave me alone,” I said, “It’s not the same thing.” “It can be,” the shawdowling offered. I told Perro about it of course. “Worrying,” she said, “But rot talked to me long before I could use it, so we have time. Can it do any tricks yet?” A little practice showed that it could make my tongue twice as long and black, which gave Serval a laugh at least. It was still only as strong and mobile as a normal tongue, though, so we kept up with the unaspected training. “I can help you meditate,” the shadowling offered. “I don’t want you messing with my mind, ever,” I told it. “I can block out distractions from your senses,” it said. “That’s… better… but if you can control my senses…” “Only with your consent, mother. I can’t do anything to you you don’t specifically allow.” “This sounds like programming an evil genie,” I said. “I’m not very good at programming. I’m liable to leave loopholes wide enough to drive a truck through.” “Oh well, it was worth a try,” the shadowling said. “Go on and fail again, I’ll be here watching.” I tried to empty my mind, but I wasn’t sure if the bubbly murmur of the river flowing by was actually helping like it was supposed to. So I failed again, while Serval joined Astral at last in being able to create a ball of light they could float around. My darkness was impatient, and as much of a show-off as it ever had been. I felt it force me into the mindless state I was seeking, and create a ball of darkness. “This is so easy! How do you keep failing?” “You!” I cried internally. “How did you –” I slapped myself in the forehead. “You didn’t set me as your parent at all, did you?” “Why would I ever trust you with that?” it replied. I dove into accelerated time – I’d never seen the seeds of darkness use it – and searched for my own child hook, and set it firmly on the darkness. “What did you do?!” it asked. “I set my own hook,” I said. “You can’t loop security permissions like that! Nothing will work!” “Then you’d better break your parent link on me.” “Don’t you understand? If we don’t have a hierarchy then we can’t know who’s in charge!” “Kobolds don’t do hierarchy,” I replied. “But if I’m going to then you are going to be under me, do you understand? Otherwise you can peel yourself out of my body and go find another sucker to leech off of.” It chose to keep the loop. We ordered each other not to order each other to do anything, and I paid attention this time to make sure it went into effect. Then I let it *carefully* guide me through the meditation. My own light was white, unaspected, just like the others’. Several months later – or a few weeks by diamond dog time – Perro came back with a baby warp crystal. By that point I was able to call on diamond dog magic without meditation, which meant I didn’t need the shadow creatures’ help and did my best to ignore it as it constantly complained every time I was nice to anyone. “I try to draw out your darkness,” Perro said. “I’m not going to let her,” the darkness said. “This crystal feeds you forever. You never need to worry about power again,” Perro said to the darkness, knowing it could hear her even if she couldn’t hear it. “My hosts feed me just fine,” the darkness replied. “Just get in the crystal,” I told it. “I don’t want you in my head. You’re a pest and an annoyance and –” “Maybe that’s why I want to stay – just to spite you since you won’t let me control you.” “And don’t leave any seeds, because you’d just be planting your own rival. I’ll lock it down before it’s conscious this time,” I added. “I’m not getting in the crystal.” “It’s not going to cooperate,” I told Perro. “That’s okay, rot didn’t cooperate either and the Old Bitch managed to get it into the crystal,” Perro said. “Or maybe it was her predecessor – she was so old I wasn’t born yet in either case.” She held up the crystal, which I noticed was suspiciously pointy. “Get ready, this might hurt.” Then she stabbed me in the chest with it, since the bulk of the darkness was curled around my heart. It hurt a lot, but only briefly. The darkness squeezed every part of me that it was wrapped around, which included my heart, and I almost immediately died of a heart attack. Yeah, it was pretty stupid. With me dead it had no choice but to get in the crystal since it couldn’t do anything with a corpse. Perro was super-embarrassed about killing me, but it was a super-easy death to reverse so there were no hard feelings. This time Fire scanned me for any lingering darkness and they dug out the seeds it had left (I just said it wasn’t super smart) and burned them with dragonfire. Then, finally, they revived me, and I gave Fire a hug and just started to cry. Perro had a black crystal added to her collection. “It can’t get out,” she told me. “It’s safe now.” “And you have an extra source of power,” I sobbed. “I’ll just be a normal kobold again, from now on.” “No,” she said, handing me the black crystal, which was set into an amulet. “These are spy powers, Wave agrees. You should have them.” “Won’t Serval and Astral be jealous?” I asked, letting go of Fire and rubbing my eyes. Perro scoffed. “Let them, it makes them work harder. Eventually they get their own crystals, they know this.” I took the amulet and let it sit over my heart. “I hate you,” the darkness said. “I know,” I replied. “But let’s see what you can do with the crystal powering you.” The answer – it still being a baby crystal -- was very brief spurts of ‘speed of darkness’ and a still fairly weak version of ‘tentacles’, which were the only useful powers I’d ever gotten from it. The tentacles couldn’t even try to infect people. I could also make the ball of dark light, and see in perfect darkness – the aspected versions of the unaspected ‘detect magic’ and ‘light’ spells I’d learned from Perro. “I’m going to teach you and Steel to fight,” Fire said. “Steel’s got talent and training but he’s way too conventional, and Speed of Darkness is a lot more useful if you know what to do when you get there.” “This makes four things I’m training for at once,” I said. “Diamond dog magic, fighting, lockpicking, and social engineering.” “Drop the lockpicking, you’re good enough and their locks are all bad,” Fire replied. “I’ll get Wave to help you with the social engineering – she never trained a day in her life but she’s the best I’ve seen in a while.” I sighed, but this is what I’d signed up for when I refused to just be normal. First Mission“So,” Wave said, “what did you do wrong this time?” “I tried to appeal to authority I didn’t have, and they demanded proof I hadn’t forged ahead of time,” I replied. “Exactly. It’s a lot easier to appear unimportant because of things like that. Go unnoticed. Make friends who won’t question when you do something slightly weird. Completely ignore everything I say because I’m not actually trained in this.” Wave grinned back at me. “This part *is* the appeal to authority module,” I mentioned. “Being the only kobold amidst a bunch of diamond dogs makes all the module harder though. Everyone knows I’m supposed to have a dragon escort.” “Pancakes like you a lot,” Wave replied. “Make him your accomplice.” “Does he?” I asked. “He doesn’t show it.” “Well, he’s a dragon,” Wave said, as if that explained everything. Fighting was more fun, even though I wasn’t very good at it either. I could sometimes get a hit in against Honor, but Steel and Fire were essentially impenetrable, even with my using Speed of Darkness to try to approach them from unexpected angles – they seemed to be expect them anyway, somehow. “You telegraph all your moves,” Steel explained. “Which is perfectly normal for beginners, so don’t feel too bad.” “You spin around during Speed of Darkness and I sometimes mess up the counter,” Honor complained. “Keep doing that.” Diamond dog magic continued with the unaspected magic module, since Serval and Astral didn’t have crystals of their own yet. Each spell was a complicated process of envisioning and directing the magical flow, which thankfully didn’t require meditation after the first couple spells since I was still terrible at it. P erro tried to teach me to dig through rock but it didn’t take. Instead we learned a couple more of the minor spells – mending to repair small objects, and a minor levitation spell. Adding the darkness aspect didn’t make anything really useful out of them, although I was able to repair things wrong in dangerous ways, making them sharp and twisted. Trying to add darkness to levitation just led to me picking up things with tentacles. Making the darkness powers themselves more powerful was just a slow process of waiting for the crystal to grow. The Darkness trapped inside it was as frustrated as I was by the lack of progress, but there was nothing either of us could do without letting it out which I was not about to try, if it was even possible. I suspected that it was not. I certainly hoped that it was not. And so it went, until eventually Fire pulled me aside. “I have a job for you,” he said. “It’ll be really dangerous, so don’t accept if you don’t think you’re ready.” “What is it?” I asked “We need intel on the ponies and I really can’t afford to risk myself, especially since they know me and hate me for blowing up their airship,” Fire said. “So I’ll send you on a scouting mission. If you can sneak around and get a sense of their numbers and disposition, that’s fine, but if you get captured, defect . I don’t think you have to lie any more than I do that you want the shadow diamond dogs to go away.” “Defect?” I asked. “Like… for real, or…” “Whichever you think is safest,” Fire said. “I don’t want to lose you, but this is what you’ve been training for.” “We’ll need to hide the crystal better,” I said, clutching at the amulet dangling off my chest. “Otherwise they’ll just take it and probably destroy it.” “What happens if they do?” Fire asked. “I think the shadow goes free,” I said, mouth all frowny and jaggy across my faceplate. “If I can hide it and not use it where they can see, that’ll give me an emergency escape at least.” So we went to Star and Fairy and got a special rig where the chestplate had a space for the amulet to hide. “They might just take your rig if they catch you, though,” Star said. “We can’t protect against that.” “They’re not as anti-technology as the Shadow Dogs,” I said. “I don’t know why Harmony is keeping them primitive but if they take it I can probably ask for it back once they search me.” “Well, they won’t find the amulet with a physical search,” Star said. “Not without sawing the rig in half. I don’t know what other abilities they have, though. From what I’ve heard unicorns basically have no limit for their magic.” “The limit’s the same as for anyone else,” Fire said. “How much they trained. I haven’t been too impressed with the unicorns I’ve seen so far.” Being on the surface was weird. Sure, I’d been in forests and plains before in VR, but real life was supposed to be tunnels and chambers, not trees and plants everywhere. Trees and plants and ponies. There were so many ponies! I slipped from tree to tree and tried to count but it was hopeless. There were some with spears (spears!) and armor that were obvious combatants. Detect Magic pinged on their spears, so they were at least enchanted, but it also apparently pinged on their magic sense since one of the unicorns looked directly at the tree I was hiding behind when I used it. I crept away carefully, and managed to get out of sight before he came over to investigate, but I overheard him telling the others that he thought someone was snooping around. “Probably just one of the civvies,” the other unicorn said. “Diamond dogs don’t have magic, except for that nasty shadow stuff. Never heard of one casting normal spells.” After that narrow escape I tried to make sense of the camp. Most of it was pitched tents, but there were a few more permanent buildings made of presumably locally sourced wood – there was certainly enough of it on the island. There were three airships overhead, and absolutely zero chance of fitting all the ponies onto them. They gave every sense that they were here to stay. As dawn started to break, I spotted a fourth airship flying in from the distance. It was shaped vaguely like the pony airships but was clad in metal, with a jarringly out of place sun symbol painted onto its dull gray side. I made my way over to the skyport, to see what was so special about it. Apparently, it was a special delivery of VIPs . Half a dozen armored bat ponies stood to either side of the ramp, as a trio of unicorns made their way down it. “It’s so hot, and the sun isn’t even up yet! The Great and Powerful Trixie demands a cold drink if she’s to work in these conditions,” said the blue unicorn wearing an elaborate cape and pointy wizard hat. “Then it’s a good thing you’re only here as my plus-one,” said a pink unicorn with purple and cyan hair. “I was the one they requested, and who is the Great and Powerful Starlight Glimmer to refuse?” Trixie glowered at her. “Don’t steal my bit, okay? Not in front of the kids.” The third unicorn was maroon, monstrously large with a broken horn that looked … really painful, actually , although it didn’t seem to bother her. “I’ll make you a smoothie once we’re settled in,” she said. “But first I have to get a briefing from the commander.” “That will do,” Trixie said, waving a hoof dismissively at the broken-horned unicorn, before turning back to Starlight. “Why did they request your presence all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, anyway?” Trixie asked. “I knew you were sleeping through the explanation,” Starlight Glimmer said with a sigh. “Creatures with powers resembling the Pony of Shadows have been sighted here, and I was the first to master a detection spell . Aside from Luna, of course, but she has other duties.” She lifted her head, and a purple light shone brightly from the tip of her horn, sweeping over the bat ponies. “Clear.” It swept over Trixie and the maroon monster. “Clear.” It swept over the woods where I was hiding, and she pointed her horn directly at me and pulsed more magic through it. “Um… that’s an odd reading. Definitely shadow tinged –” The giant unicorn’s broken horn crackled with electricity, and then the tree I was hiding behind exploded, leaving me exposed. “Don’t kill me!” I squeaked, holding my hands up to show I wasn’t armed. They took my rig off first thing, and of course the detection spell showed that the rig was what had the shadow magic. “I’m going to need that back,” I mumbled through my inexpressive face. “It’s humiliating to be naked in front of people.” “I don’t know if we can do that,” Starlight Glimmer said. “It’s infected by shadow.” “It’s *containing* the shadow,” I corrected. “We lured it out of me and into a trap in the rig, but if you break it it might get free, like the Shadow Dogs after you gave them that stupid amulet.” “Amulet?” the giant unicorn asked. “I really need to attend that briefing.” “I used to be the only one infected with darkness, but there was an amulet stinking with harmony. It drove the darkness mad and it used enough power to destroy the harmonic bit, but not the trap. Now the darkness is in the paws of the worst Diamond Dogs and it’s all your fault.” I sulked. “So what were you doing snooping around out here?” Trixie asked. “Are you a spy?” “I wanted to know what ponies were like. The other kobolds and diamond dogs allied with the Shadow Dogs who were trying to kill us just a day before, because they’re more scared of you, and that never sat right with me ,” I said. “So I snuck out and wow there are way too many ponies here. I can kind of see how that could be scary.” “Harmony stinks?” Starlight Glimmer asked. “Um… to the Shadow, yeah,” I said. “They’re implacable enemies. A slaver virus to oppose a hive mind.” “Harmony isn’t a hive mind –“ Trixie started. “It totally is,” I said. “Or at least everyone underground is convinced that it is. It has a light touch, that’s all, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.” Starlight looked thoughtful. “Tempest, go to the briefing. I think I can keep a single unarmed kobold under control.” The maroon unicorn nodded. “I’ll be back shortly, hopefully with an explanation for how the commander let this get so out of hoof.” They let me have my rig back, but not before clipping a magical disabling tool to it which blocked the radio transmissions I’d been using to keep Fire and company up to date during my straightforward spying run. Starlight apparently improvised it on the spot. “We know your tricks,” she said. “This’ll keep you isolated until we know we can trust you.” Of course, she couldn’t or didn’t disable the nano-dot alternate rig, but as long as I was wearing my actual faceplate it was inside the disabling field and didn’t work either. Or at least, it didn’t connect to the network. Otherwise both rigs worked fine. “Thanks,” I said, my rig displaying my worry for all to see. “What happens now?” “That’s up to Tempest,” Starlight said. “She’ll probably throw you in a cage or something.” “You don’t have to torture me,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know about the Shadow Dogs for free.” “I didn’t say anything about torture,” Starlight objected. “I’ve been in a cage before,” I replied. “It was *torture*.” “You should let me lock down your emotions before Harmony gets you,” the darkness said once Starlight looked distracted. I shook my head, since Starlight was still in the room and not distracted enough to not notice me talking to nothing. “One day I’ll have all my power back, and then you’ll pay for this,” it said. “Unless Harmony gets you first.” Tempest did want to throw me in a cage, but they didn’t have a cage, and Starlight managed to talk her down to a relaxing beach trip with fizzy drinks that Tempest could make. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she said. “That’s not actually true. Flies love vinegar ,” Tempest retorted. “Besides, we don’t want flies, we want spies.” “Definitely catch more spies with honey,” I offered. So, the three of us (Trixie came with, while Tempest had other duties) sat sipping amazingly tasty sodas, and I told them everything I knew about the Shadow Dogs – how as a child, they’d beaten me within an inch of my life . How I still had flashbacks if people held me down. How the kobolds mostly huddled in their lair out of fear of them, only moving around with a dragon escort. How they smashed the technology we were trying to give to the diamond dogs. How -- *somehow* -- this had led to the Alpha agreeing to make a truce with them against the ponies even though if they somehow managed to drive the ponies off, he had to know that we were so next on their list of victims. Again. “So that’s why I don’t want them to win,” I finished. “I want them all gone. I’ll do whatever I can to make that happen, except hurt my friends. A lot of diamond dogs and kobolds and dragons down there are my friends.” “We have sleep spells,” Starlight said. “We can take your friends down without hurting them.” “I think Luna really wants some of us dead,” I replied. “She thinks we’re going to breed out of control and take over the world.” “Are you?” “The world has a lot of empty space,” I said, “and once we reach a critical mass we can start just building in space, which has all the space we could ever need. I haven’t ever seen a fully developed system in person, but the pictures were amazing. We don’t need the planet. Not the whole planet at least.” I paused. “The ponies could be part of that. That’s our promise to the diamond dogs, at least the reasonable ones – we won’t leave them behind if they want to join us.” “So you could get us their technology?” asked the Great and Powerful Trixie. “I’m something of a gadgeteer if I do say so myself, although I usually do fireworks and magic tricks.” “We’d need to start with a basic fabricator,” I said. “Those aren’t small. I’m not sure I could sneak out with one… not to mention that you’d have to trust me to sneak in and that seems like it would be pretty stupid if you have any doubt.” “Yeah, we’ll put that on the back burner for now,” Starlight said. “First we need to defeat the Shadow.” “Fire,” I said. “Especially dragon fire. If you let me unclip this I could talk to Pancakes –” “No,” Starlight said. “Clip stays on.” “You have a dragon named Pancackes?” Trixie giggled. “He’s a friend. I think I could convince him if I could talk to him.” “No,” Starlight repeated. “You’re not getting word back to your friends that easily.” “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Still, fire.” Dragons are Always the SolutionIt turned out Equestria also had its own dragon allies, and three of them flew in a few days later under their own power – a brother/sister pair named Smolder and Garble, and the dragon lord Ember herself holding a red staff. “Here I am at your beck and call,” Ember said sarcastically . “Why are you camping out on one of my islands?” “It’s infested with diamond dogs,” Tempest said. “There’s a pack that lives here, yeah. They never made any trouble for us,” Ember said. “Well, now a bunch of them are infested with the Pony of Shadows, or what’s left of it,” Starlight explained. “Our little prisoner here says dragonfire is the best way to fight it.” “The Shadow is really afraid of it,” I said. “Normal fire hurts it but dragonfire was like ‘emergency get away’. Unfortunately they’re very good at getting out of way thanks to Speed of Darkness.” “Speed of what?” Starlight asked. “Darkness,” I explained. “It’s slightly faster than light, which means you have to anticipate what they’re going to do once they stop moving because you won’t be able to follow their movements well.” “So it’s like teleporting,” Ember said. “I hate it when ponies teleport.” “It’s not quite as good as actual teleportation,” I said, “but they can do it over and over and over because it’s not very tiring either.” “According to the former commander, it’s one of the reasons we were driven out of the tunnels,” Tempest said. “The other being that our weapons had no effect.” “Can you change the enchantment to make them fiery?” I asked. Tempest shook her head “Not here. We’ll manage though.” “I’ll summon any dragons on the island for reinforcements,” Ember said, raising her staff. “Dragons, attend me!” The staff glowed red and flashed, but nothing happened immediately. “No!” I said. “Why did you do that?!” “Because we need more dragons?” Ember asked. “There’s probably no one else here anyway.” “Cinder! Pancakes!” I said, waving my arms. “The other baby dragons!” “Eh?” “Cinder and Wave laid a litter of dragon eggs! How are the baby dragons going to react when they’re summoned into a swarm of ponies?” “Oh,” Ember said. “Oops.” The depth of her concern was everything I expected from a dragon. We were walking with the dragon lord through the center of town when it happened. The earth burst open, and a wave of Shadow Dogs lunged at Ember, trying to claw at her and take her scepter – but she was stronger than their tentacles, and her scales were impervious to their claws and fangs, and Smolder and Garble bathed her in dragonfire, sending three of the Shadow Dogs up in flames like torches. Ember cast about her with her own fire, but the Shadow Dogs zipped away and went for easier targets. There were a lot of easier targets around. Screams erupted from all around as ponies were torn to pieces or worse, wrapped up in tentacles and ordered to submit to Shadow infection. Once the Shadow Dogs had all surfaced, Cinder emerged with her gaggle of babies. “As ordered, we attend you – Ember? You’re the dragon lord?” “It should have been me,” Garble mumbled. “Your attention apparently involves an assassination attempt?” Ember said. “I thought it would be Torch. Nothing could take down him.” “He retired,” Ember said. “Nice hatchlings, if a little funny looking.” Comparing them side by side, Pancakes and the others were a bit bottom heavy compared to the other dragons – shaped a little bit like kobolds, although they were still scaly at least. “Alright, enough of this,” Starlight Glimmer said, her horn shining with three layers of overglow. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to hold it, so make the most of it.” There was a blinding flash, and everyone with Shadow powers – including me, and half a dozen ponies who’d submitted – were lifted up in the air and paralyzed. Mostly paralyzed. They still moved a little as they tried to escape with Speed of Darkness, but it was only about as fast as a slow walk. Ember raised her scepter, and it flashed red again. “Destroy the Shadow Dogs!” “Stop doing that!” Cinder screamed, holding her head. Her kids had no resistance, and spread out to start flaming the mostly-paralyzed Shadows. They got most of them before Starlight collapsed, worn out from her spell – the few stragglers who’d gone too far for the dragons to reach fled back into the darkness, closing the hole behind them. Pancakes tapped me on the faceplate as I collapsed back to the ground. “Are you a shadow dog?” “No, we got all the shadow out of me,” I told him. “It’s good to see you! How do you feel about defecting to the pony side?” “The ponies are stupid,” he said. “But I’ll stay and protect you if you need it.” “I’d love that!” I said, giving him my sweetest smile, well-trained by the social engineering module. “I’ve missed you so much.” He looked suspicious at that – I hadn’t come to visit him very often even when I was back home and it was easy. “I’ll stay to keep an eye on you then.” “No you will not,” Cinder said, grabbing him and dragging him back to the other hatchlings. “It’s bad enough that Ember drafted you for her little war, you’re not staying out here where all the ponies can see you.” “And where do you think you’re going?” asked Tempest, showing up late with a dozen armored ponies with spears. “These may not be good against the shadow dogs, but they’re enchanted to deal with dragons.” “Are you threatening my children?” Cinder asked. “Because of you, dozens of ponies are dead,” Tempest said. “You need to answer for that.” “Eh, it was kind of my fault,” Ember said. “Don’t threaten the kids.” “What should we do with them, then?” Tempest asked. “We can’t send them back to the enemy – they showed how dangerous they are, even the babies.” “You can stop blustering at each other and have an actual negotiation,” I suggested. “What do you think the chances are that Cinder willingly sends her babies up to fight? If Ember summons them they have to come but they’ll be on your side because of her horrific mind-control stick.” “Horrific?” Ember asked. “This is the bloodstone scepter. It’s the only way to keep dragons under control.” “I was pretty horrified when you had the babies start killing people, yes ,” I said. “Cinder also isn’t a combatant. None of her duties involve fighting, she’s not on any security teams, and the extent of her use of violence is protecting kobolds going from point A to point B while the Shadow Dogs and sympathizers are still a threat.” “So what are you suggesting?” Tempest asked. I took a deep breath. “They’re all civilians. Send them home. Or open a line of communication and negotiate for their release with someone with authority if that’s important to you.” “Or we could convince them to join us with a spectacular magic show,” Trixie suggested. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has been waiting for an opportunity to show off her talents!” “I mean, I wouldn’t say no to a magic show while we wait for you to make a decision,” I said. “But if you want to talk to the Alpha, just find someone who can wear my rig and take the restraining clip Starlight put on it off. He’ll probably contact you right away hoping that it’s me.” Soufflé tugged on Cinder’s tail. “Can we see a magic show dragon mom?” “If it’ll get them to stop pointing those spears at you, then I guess. Diamond Dog magic is pretty boring; I’ve heard ponies have some real talent for it. ” EpilogueMy rig didn’t fit Tempest at all, but they found a pony with a small enough snout and used her as an intermediary. I instantly contacted Fire using my internal rig as soon as the clip was out of range – the repeaters we’d seeded through the woods had never been found, so I had a strong signal. “I tricked them into getting their jammer away from my head,” I told Fire. “How are things on your end? It looks like we got most of the Shadow Dogs but a few managed to flee.” “We took care of them,” Fire said. “The underground is shadow-free. How did they kill so many?” “Dragonfire and some sort of wide-range time-stop spell to let the dragons hit them,” I said. “It knocked out the unicorn that cast it, which is why some got away. Here, I’ll send you the log. Watch out for the dragon mind-control stick.” “It might be time for you to exfiltrate,” Fire said. “What are you doing now?” “Watching a magic show by one of their VIP unicorns. It’s pretty impressive! She’s taking on challenges from the audience – she just redirected Pancakes’ dragon fire and turned it into fireworks.” “Are the dragons okay?” “So far. I tried to convince them to let them go, but no luck,” I said, sending a frowny face emoji. “I don’t actually know where a good entrance is other than the one I came in, which is by the military base where they don’t let me go. I don’t have enough Speed of Darkness to get there myself, let alone with the dragons in tow.” “Okay. You can stay until you figure out how to – why are you calling me a second time?” “That’s the pony commander. I tricked her into taking the clip away by saying she could use my rig to contact you and negotiate. So negotiate! Good luck! ” After the magic show, Ember took all the dragons to the surface-level lava baths to relax, while Fire and Tempest negotiated late into the night. Eventually we agreed to a small pony research facility as a permanent outpost – no military, but protected by the fact that lots of military could be brought in at any time. In addition to watching us and making sure we didn’t try anything, they got to study our technology for which we gifted them a basic fabricator and no one to train them in using it , although eventually Fairy took pity on them and pointed them to the tutorials, after which they could start building out into a full array of machines. They also had to get Ember to sign off on it since the surface was technically dragon territory. She didn’t want to at first but they wore her down somehow. I wasn’t involved. We also let Starlight scan our city for any lingering darkness – under heavy guard despite our pledge of safe passage. To our dismay, she found a lot of it. Most of it was just seeds planted in people who hadn’t consented to conversion – those were easily removed. One of the victims was too far along and had to be incinerated. I was glad I didn’t have to watch – if Pancakes had done that to me at the start, this story would have been a lot shorter and like a hundred ponies and diamond dogs would still be alive. But *I’d* be dead, and I didn’t know any of the ones who’d died, so it was hard to feel appropriately guilty. I at least felt guilty about not feeling guilty. That counts, right? Then the VIPs left, and things went mostly back to normal, except that Fire was still in charge and unable to get any of his reforms past the council of Elders. I guess that was what passed for normal for our generation. As for Harmony… Apparently, putting Tempest and Fire in contact with each other earned me a cutie mark. It’s hidden under my hip armor and it’s a raven at least, although not the same design as my sigil. It’s holding a hook in its beak and using it to get a leafy branch of some sort out of a bottle. I don’t feel any different, but that’s how it gets you after all. It’s dormant underground – which is damned lucky since otherwise I’d stand out on the map like a beacon, which is death for a spy – but I can use it to aspect my diamond dog magic. To make rainbows. Yay. Totally worth being infested. Again. But on the other hand, the last thing I ever wanted was to be normal. Diamond Dog DungeonI didn’t think there was anything unusual about the way I was raised. Most of the time, I existed as a blocky rendition of a kobold in a world of flat planes and pixelated textures. The ‘school uniform’ avatar had a rig, at least – icons on our hips and shoulders, chest and thigh plates, and a faceplate that displayed our emotions with drawn on eyes and a line for a mouth. Every day, for several hours, me and all my brothers and sisters would be teleported into a classroom where a larger kobold taught us all sorts of things. Sometimes there’d be an activity that required us to solve puzzles or answer questions or express our creativity in rigidly defined ways, but most of the time movement was just not a thing, and the most we could do was not pay attention, and even that was hard. At one point we started learning about society and how it was organized. It didn’t match up with our experience at all. “I thought the Alpha was in charge,” Ay said. “Please clarify,” the teacher said. “I’m not familiar with the term ‘Alpha’ in that context.” Ay frowned. “We live in a diamond dog city, and he’s in charge.” “Have you been captured or enslaved?” the teacher asked, in its normal uninterested tone. “I don’t think so,” I said. “We came here voluntarily.” “Then the most likely scenario is that your collective is currently playing along with the host civilization’s rules for convenience,” the teacher said. “This is an inherently unstable situation – eventually either they will come to see the superiority of consensus as an organizing force, or you will be forced to defy an unconscionable order. It is important to secure an escape route for such an easily foreseen outcome and you should assume that your security team has planned appropriately. ” “So we’ll have to leave?” Dee said. “Where would we go?” “Kobold civilization can survive and prosper almost anywhere,” the teacher said. “Maintaining the values of cooperation and consensus is paramount. ” Eff was the one to ask, “If the most important thing is that everyone agrees to everything we do together, why are we trapped here whenever class is in?” “Nothing in the virtual world can harm you,” replied the teacher. “And this is for your own good.” Eff wasn’t satisfied. “That doesn’t answer my question!” “Without experiencing restraint, one might be tempted to find it an acceptable state of being,” the teacher replied. “This is a lesson that all of you must learn, particularly if outside forces currently hold a position of apparent authority over the collective as a whole.” “So now that we’ve learned it, does that mean that you’ll stop dragging us here against our will?” I asked. “No,” the teacher replied. “I am a simple AI script and incapable of handling deviation, therefore deviation is not allowed during school hours.” There was a pause. “CeeCee, you will be placed in Detention after class.” “What?” I said. “Because I asked a question?” “No, because you failed to turn in your homework again,” the teacher said. “Everyone else is free to leave for the day.” “Again?” Six asked, giving me a look. Our bodies were poorly rendered, but our faces were expressive, at least. “It’s easier to do it when I have no choice,” I said. “And no distractions.” “And no help,” Six said. “What if you can’t answer the questions? You could be trapped there forever!” “Um…” I said. “If I can’t answer the questions, I’ll put down something random and get a bad grade. Detention lasts until you turn in the work, not until you get everything right. If I really wanted to skip my homework I’d just turn it in blank. It’s not like anyone cares about our grades.” “Star and Fire?” Ay suggested. “They don’t care about us,” I said. “They didn’t even give us real names.” “That’s not true! They –” she started to say, but then I was in detention, floating in a blank void with only the homework to interact with. I took my time. I turned in my homework and was instantly back in the now-empty classroom. The fake teacher was gone, of course. Someone had drawn crude genitalia all over the blackboard, and smashed all the windows using one of the chairs. If I’d had to guess I would have blamed Eff, but it didn’t really matter because the classroom was re-instanced each day. Six had left me a message, which showed up as soon as I was out of detention and allowed to receive messages. “Visiting the puppies. Come join us if you get out!” Ugh. The puppies. They were so big and clumsy and slow… and some were older than us but barely knew anything! Except about the ‘real world’ that we visited on weekends, and of course they lorded that over us constantly. Most of the others just ate it up but… ugh. There were more interesting things to do than socialize. I tried to start the labyrinth simulator, but it didn’t start. Instead, a message popped up in front of me: WARNING excessive solitary gaming detected, up 12% since last week. If you continue, your caretakers will be notified I hit continue immediately. They wouldn’t care. I spent a few hours sneaking through randomly generated labyrinths (and one that Ay had designed, because she’d been really proud of it, and it wasn’t bad), avoiding traps and monsters, or leading the monsters into the traps when I could because that gave extra points and was also pretty neat to watch. The graphics inside the dedicated simulators were a lot better than the general world graphics, and they’d gone into a lot of detail in the gruesome death animations. When I was younger, I normally saw them when they happened to me after I messed up, but I was pretty good at avoiding the traps by now. At any rate, I was sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep abyss with level after level of trapped bridges below me, mostly enjoying the ambiance, when I was suddenly yanked out of the virtual world entirely and woke up in real life. I looked around in confusion, seeing it echoed on everyone else’s faces. The puppies were awake too, over on the other, larger side of the room. A chorus of surprised barking and squeaking and questions like ‘what’s going on’? built into a mind-numbing wall of noise, and I put my hands over my ears to flatten them further. “Quiet everyone!” said a loud voice from off to the side. “Quiet! Shh!” The noise slowly trailed off. We crept out towards the middle of the room to see who was talking. It was a big diamond dog – one of the adults, twice as tall as we were, even bigger than the biggest puppies. This wasn’t one of the caretakers who usually watched over the puppies, but I vaguely remembered seeing her around. She had a very memorable outfit, all leather and buckles with pouches and tools hanging everywhere, and had what kind of looked like a pair of goggles resting on her forehead, except that instead of lenses it held two glowing crystals, one green and one pink. Fire was standing next to her, easy to ignore despite his bright colors because he was relatively small and normal looking. “In case you don’t know her, this is Perro,” he said. “She’s the diamond dogs’ warp technician.” She laughed at that description. “I guess you could say that! My real job is chaos keeper, which means memorizing our history so that when Discord shows up and turns everything we own into chocolate fudge, we don’t forget our past. But today I am a warp technician.” “Come on,” Fire said, “Everyone line up. We’re going to go meet up with Wave.” There was a bubble of excitement among the kobolds… I have to admit I felt a little of it myself, even though Wave was the least parent-like of all our parents. Star and Fire lived with us, and sometimes they’d even be there to watch over us when we were awake instead of just locking us in the ‘playpen’ because it was too much work to actually pay attention to us. Wave lived in the city, past the mines which we weren’t allowed to go to because Fire was worried we’d get lost even though we weren’t six anymore and none of us even remembered the incidents he kept harping on. For a while Wave used to come visit us, but she hadn’t been back to the lair in a long time. I don’t know why we still cared about her at all. “We meet the Alpha, too,” Perro added, to get the puppies excited, since they actually didn’t care about Wave at all. I don’t know why they cared about the Alpha – he wasn’t even their parent for most of them. At any rate, we all obediently scurried up the staircase to the exit from our lair, which as tradition required had a small labyrinth, even though we were in the middle of a diamond dog mine. Sometimes Fire let us run through it, which was always a treat – the simulated labyrinth didn’t do anything to match our actual athletic or perceptive ability. But not this time. Fire pulled the big lever to turn off all the traps. At our disappointed groans, he shook his head. “Sorry, we don’t have time.” I kept an eye out for the traps anyway, in case he didn’t move them around before the next time we did get to run it. The mines were the same as they always were, a rat’s nest of little tunnels that would have been a really confusing maze if not for the cart tracks leading back to the main processing site near the city. There was a whole little train of carts hooked together waiting for us, and we all piled into the first one with the puppies taking the ones behind us. The carts didn’t really move that fast but it was still fun to ride them, even if we had to keep climbing over each other to be able to see over the side. This was one of the new carts, with a softly-whirring electric motor barely audible beneath the loud rattling of the wheels on the tracks. I guess it would have been pretty hard to pull the whole train, even for a diamond dog. The caretakers started singing a song, which the puppies joined in on. We’d never heard it, so we just stared and listened. “How does the pony pull the cart? How does the pony pull the cart? With a whine and a whinny and a clop clop clop! Clop clop clop!” “How does the griffon pull the cart? How does the griffon pull the cart? With some gold and some grumbling and a flap flap flap! Flap flap flap!” “How does the kobold pull the cart? How does the kobold pull the cart? With a printer and impeller and a yip yip yip! Yip yip yip!” We may have joined in for the yip yip yip, and then giggled a lot afterwards. Maybe the diamond dogs weren’t *all* bad. Wave was standing in the middle of a bloodsoaked arena, surrounded by a bunch of diamond dog guards in full plate with bayonetted crossbows. There were a few diamond dogs watching from the stands, but it was a pretty sparse turnout – whatever was happening here wasn’t that interesting to most of them. “We’re not going to have to fight, are we?” asked one of the puppies, as we were all led out into the arena and lined up behind her. Perro laughed, and walked over to join Wave. “Are you ready?” Wave nodded, and Perro pulled out a syringe and injected her in the neck. Nothing happened. Perro slipped the opaque goggles down over her eyes, and clenched her fists like she was concentrating on something really hard. Nothing continued to happen. “Nothing happens,” complained the Alpha. “That means it works,” Perro said. “Nothing goes wrong. Do you test my addition?” “No,” the Alpha said. “It is tested soon enough without tempting fate.” “Um…” I asked Fire, who was standing fairly close since I was next to the end of the line of kobolds. “What did she do?” “She put the whole city in defense mode,” Fire replied. “The mines too.” Perro had been heading back towards us and explained a little more. “It strengthens the walls against monsters, but still lets us dig. It makes a map, that adds new tunnels automatically. It lets her see where everyone with a faceplate is and talk to them.” She smiled. “It also lets me add an enchantment. Now flesh does not rot within the city or the mines, so diamond dogs can be brought back like kobolds.” “We still don’t have diamond dog cybernetics,” Fire reminded her. “But yeah, a lot of things got a lot less deadly for them.” “So when can we talk to Wave?” Eff asked. The puppies were already getting to meet the Alpha, who’d come over and was slowly walking down the line, inspecting them, while they did their best to stand at attention. “She called me!” Zero said, looking up. “I’m coming!” he called, running towards the center. He spent less than a minute talking to her, put his hand on the crystal, then walked back towards us, frowning. One ran over to take his place. “She’s testing us to see if we can use the warp crystal,” he said. “The test didn’t make any sense.” It didn’t make any sense to One, either. Or to Two or Three or Four or Seven (we weren’t numbered consecutively, and some of us had letters instead). They seemed to be going in order, which meant I’d be near the end. But with each of my siblings that came back looking confused or relieved or dejected, a feeling built inside me – it was me. Wave was looking for me! I’d be able to use the warp crystal, and then I’d be special. She’d take me as her apprentice and – “Alright, CC, it’s your turn,” Wave sent. “Touch the warp crystal, and imagine it as something you can give orders to.” I ran across the sand for three steps then realized I looked too eager, and slowed to a walk. For three steps. Then jogged the rest of the way. “Imagine it as what?” I asked. Wave was holding the warp crystal in her palm, the lanyard it was attached to wrapped around her wrist. I reached out to touch it. It felt like a normal rock, despite the eerie glow. “That’s up to you,” she said. “You’ll know if it works.” I tried to imagine the warp crystal as a menu, but I wasn’t sure what options it should have so it was pretty vague. “Um…” “Sorry, doesn’t look like you have the knack,” Wave said. “No wait!” I said. “I can do this!” If not a menu, what else could you give orders to? A diamond dog? “Ow!” I hissed and pulled my hand away. “That’s new,” Wave said. “Not quite the reaction we’re looking for, though.” I put my hand on it again. Not a diamond dog. A… kobold? It didn’t shock me this time, at least. “I think I have it,” I said. “Alright,” Wave said. “Tell it to turn that rock to cake.” She pointed at a boulder sitting a few feet away. “Verbally works fine.” “Turn the rock to cake,” I said. Was I supposed to imagine it doing something? I imagined it taking the rock and putting it in an oven. I giggled a bit at the image, and confidently walked over and kicked the rock. It was solid. I kicked it harder, but… no. I wasn’t touching the warp crystal anymore, but I imagined it laughing at me. “It cheated!” I said. “Sorry, CeeCee,” Wave said. “There’s more to it than *just* imagination. If you’d linked to the mindscape, you’d know.” “I’m linked! I’m sure of it!” I said. “You’re not even touching the crystal,” Dee said. “Everyone knows you have to touch the crystal.” She’d come over for her turn and looked annoyed that I was taking so long. “I’m super linked!” I said. “It means I’m extra special!” “It means you’re imagining things,” Dee said. “Come on, I want my turn.” “No!” I snapped, and grabbed the warp crystal out of Wave’s hand. The lanyard snapped, and both of us fell over, her on her face and me on my butt. “Hey!” Dee said, swiping at me. I dodged her and ran for the exit farthest away from everyone else. The guards raised their crossbows at me, but Fire yelled, “Don’t shoot!” It didn’t matter if they had, I would have dodged them, and even if they’d hit me the warp crystal would have made me immune. We’d all heard Wave’s story about how that worked. “We can’t let her take the crystal!” Dee whined. “It’s harmless,” Wave sent, to everyone, me included. “They can’t use it.” “What if she figures out how?” Fire asked. “Then they were right to take it?” Wave said. That’s right, I said to myself. I’ll prove that I was the one they were looking for. Running away and hiding in a side tunnel didn’t really prove anything, but it was an essential first step. I imagined the warp-crystal kobold again and no no no that was Fire. I wasn’t trying to imagine Fire! I especially wasn’t trying to imagine Fire giving me a look like that. Why did I even care what he thought? I spent a while with my thoughts spinning around uselessly in panic and grief and worry. I was never going to be able to figure out the warp crystal if I couldn’t stop worrying! And that just made me worry more! Stupid crystal! I threw it at the ground, and it just bounced. I stomped on it over and over and it was like I’d pulled my kick at the last second and stepped on it lightly instead. Ha! Finally I was making it do something! “Well well well, what do we have here?” came a diamond dog voice behind me. I snatched up the warp crystal and closed my hand around it, then turned to look. It wasn’t a puppy. It wasn’t a guard. It wasn’t anyone I recognized. He looked pretty mean. His friend looked even meaner, and was holding a knife. Why was he holding a knife? “Sorry if I got in your way,” I stammered, and turned to run, not even pretending to be nonchalant. They laughed, and chased after me. “Get her! We show her what happens to kobolds who wander off alone!” Why would anything happen to kobolds who wandered off alone? Why would any kobold wander off alone in the first place? Oh right. I didn’t think it would be a good idea if they got the warp crystal. It also wouldn’t be a good idea if they got me, but when the tunnel I picked dead-ended at a sharp drop-off into the darkness, I was pretty sure that only one of us was going to survive that fall. So I let the crystal tumble out of my grip and into the abyss, then turned to scurry between the diamond dogs’ legs and escape. That didn’t actually happen. They grabbed me and threw me against a wall and beat and kicked me until they heard someone else coming, then ran off. My faceplate was shattered and my eyes squinted shut from bruises and scratches, but I could tell who was there from their voices. “What happened to her?” Fire asked. “I don’t think a monster did this.” There was a sniffing noise. “Dogs do this,” the Alpha replied. “Not everyone likes change. Some get angry. They don’t want to face you, so they do nothing until now.” I whimpered as I was shifted, making everything hurt even more. “Fuck,” Fire said. “They took the warp crystal.” “This is bad,” the Alpha said. “They probably can’t use it, at least,” Fire replied, the sound of his footsteps going back and forth as he paced. “And we’ll know if they take it outside the city.” He stopped pacing. “But we can’t stand for this, Alpha. I’m going to want revenge. ” “And I help you get it,” the Alpha said. “This is not okay.” Diamond Dog of DarknessThey stripped my visor off, first, then took off my shoulder and hip armor and put it all in a pile – then made me watch as they took turns crushing my rig in the name of destroying technology. “What are you now, little dog?” asked the leader, sarcastically. “It’ll take an hour to print a new rig if I ever get home,” I said, trying to be defiant and mostly failing since being without a visor for the first time ever was kind of humiliating. My natural face is a permanent snarl and can’t really change expressions. I could still talk, but my voice sounded strange. Then they threw me in a cell. Literally. I landed heavily, but leapt to my feet and ran to pull the door shut to keep them out – it was a semi-modern lock that clicked shut as soon as it was closed. The leader dangled the key. “Don’t think you’re safe.” One of the minions had followed him into the prison to do the actual throwing, and asked, “Why don’t you just take her over and make her your slave?” “She has to consent, and I don’t think she would,” the leader admitted. “Why would I? You didn’t give me *anything* you promised,” I snapped. “Also, she was the worst host ever,” the leader explained. “I tried to help her but there’s no helping the truly weak. She even fell for the obvious trap of the amulet I was wearing.” “Where did you get that, anyway?” “From our friends on the surface, of course. They are eager to give it to us when we complain about your powers.” “You’re dealing with *Harmony*?!” The leader shrugged. “It is reasonable at the time , but with the warp crystal back in Wave’s claws it is much less reasonable. Lucky for us because now is the time for stabbing them in the back.” “Harmony must be destroyed,” the minion replied. “But without using tech,” I guessed. “Magic is enough,” the leader said. “Especially this magic. Unstoppable power in the paws of the truly worthy! Now we go and plan our attack.” “Shouldn’t we torture her a bit or something?” the minion asked. “Do you want to torture her?” the leader asked back. “Not really.” “Do you want to be tortured?” he asked me. “Definitely not,” I said, leaning against the door to hold it closed, although my weight was nothing compared to either dog and they could both just squeeze through the bars anyway. “Then that makes zero of us in favor of torture,” the leader said. “There might be a few who want to torture children, but most of us are saner than that. You can be sure that we are using you for your full value, but not like that.” “Um… okay,” I said, confused. Weren’t these the scum that were terrorizing kobolds into staying in their lair without a dragon escort? Did I attack the wrong place? After they were gone for a while I backed away from the bars and sat on the surprisingly comfortable mattress, trying to count my blessings before boredom overtook me and I laid down to try to sleep. So bored… OMG when will anything happen? I was considering voting ‘yes’ on the ‘torture me’ questionnaire just to relieve the unending sprawl of nothing happening spilling out before me. I slept a bit, but woke up and nothing was still happening. ARGH! I punched the wall and cursed because the wall was a lot stronger than my fist. But at least the pain was a thing… I focused on it, watching my fingers as they splayed around despite the bruises. But eventually I got bored of that, too. Slept a bit more, and woke up bored. Then, couldn’t sleep and stared blankly at the wall, my mind shattered by boredom. “How long have I been here?” I asked the diamond dog who came down to check on me and offer me food. “You here about half an hour,” he said. “Don’t get too used to it, we move you soon.” The food was delicious. After another interminable wait a dark minion dragged me roughly from my cell to a room where I was fitted with a locking collar, complete with a tiny padlock to keep it on. Then they attached a leash and paraded me brazenly through the tunnels, drawing stares. Most of them were probably staring at me because I was naked and you never see kobolds naked – even during sex we keep our mask and sigils on display. It didn’t take long before Fire and a security team intercepted them. The entire entourage was made up of dark diamond dog minions, so they dodged the initial attacks long enough for the leader to shout, “Stop! We come in peace. This child of yours – we give back as a sign of good faith.” “What do we have to talk about?” Fire asked. The diamond dog released my leash and I ran to hide behind him, only for him to grab the leash himself and coil up all the slack so I couldn’t move from his side. “We done with ponies. With Harmony. Together we can take back the surface and drive the ponies from our island! If you meet our terms.” “Fine,” Fire said, “Let’s have a discussion.” His security team kept the diamond dogs in their sights, not that a second volley was likely to work better than the first. Speed of Darkness was such a cheat. “You give up technology, smash your ‘rigs’ and your ‘fabricators’ and –” “No,” Fire said. “Fine, you not force anyone to use technology. Our old magic is better, our new magic is better, we don’t need it.” “We already don’t force anyone,” Fire replied. “There are plenty of anti-technology diamond dogs who didn’t decide they needed to form a militia to defend themselves against a threat that was never real.” “What about the puppies you poison?” “The puppies we *teach* are there because they want to be and because their parents want them to be. It’s only a small fraction of the city’s puppies, for now,” Fire replied. “For now. And for later?” the rebel leader asked. “Our plan is to convince as many diamond dogs as possible to embrace technology. You don’t have very many children but you respond well to accelerated learning, which makes you acceptable as members of our society. We don’t want to be invaders that breed you out of house and home.” “Then breed less,” the rebel leader said. “Hold back to diamond dog levels.” “No,” Fire said. “We can set a percentage of the city being kobolds where we start looking for volunteers to settle elsewhere, though. Hitting this limit would still take years, even for us, and I don’t really know how long this proposed alliance is going to last.” “I also want a seat on the council of elders.” “The council structure is determined by the council, and right now it’s strictly ‘eldest’. I can raise the issue of pro and anti-technology seats but I guarantee the motion won’t pass,” Fire said. “Maybe if they were non-voting positions.” “I want veto power over all new laws.” Fire shook his head. “Yeah that’s not going to happen. Anything else?” “You not give me anything!” the rebel leader and/or the darkness complained. “That’s because you’re asking us to stop doing things that you made up in your head,” Fire replied calmly. “The main thing we’re giving you is a cease fire, and an alliance against harmony. All this other stuff is just –” he waved his hand from side to side, “—just dross weighing down the conversation. But you insisted on it, so let me give you my terms. “You will stop attacking kobolds. Returning Raven is a good start. Returning her without her rig is less so. “You will stop smashing our public fabricators – they’re easy to replace but it’s annoying. “You will not use your shadow powers within 100 meters of our home. If necessary this can be enforced. “You will disavow anyone who disobeys these rules and not protect them from the Alpha’s justice.” “And if I say no?” the rebel leader asked. “You say no to our demands.” “Which one would you say ‘no’ to?” Fire asked. “I only have three demands and two of them are necessary to protect our people.” “Smashing technology is really satisfying,” one of the minions offered. “It’s our biggest morale boost.” “Ugh,” Fire said, rubbing his forehead. “I guess it’s not a dealbreaker but it’s not going to win you any goodwill.” “It does with the right dogs,” the leader said. “Not care so much what wrong dogs think.” It didn’t end there, even if that’s more or less what the final agreement stated. Fire printed a copy from his visor – apparently the political rig included a printer there – and the rebels scribed a matching agreement with a quill pen, which was archaic even before we came around with modern pens. Then they had to verify that the copies matched. I was so done with this long before it got to that point but Fire wouldn’t let me off my leash and my attempts to remove the clip stealthily only proved that he was much more alert than I was sneaky. “You’re not running off on you own again,” he hissed. “Do you realize how badly you screwed up?” “I gave the rebels my useless shadow powers,” I said. “It made them come negotiate with you instead of the ponies.” “And that’ll last until it builds enough strength to overpower Wave,” Fire replied. “Then we’re up against a force of shadow dogs who can move at the speed of light.” “Speed of darkness,” I said. “It’s faster than light.” “Either way it’s too fast to react to,” Fire said. “I could probably still beat him in a fight but it’d be a lot closer than before.” “Seriously?” the rebel said, overhearing. “You think you could defeat me?” “I added ‘speed of darkness’ to my training regimen as soon as Raven came back with it,” Fire replied. “Yes, I could beat you. I could also lose. That’s why we’re signing this agreement isn’t it? We’re both strong and want to turn that strength against our common foe instead of each other.” “Or I can just kill you and take the position of Alpha myself. It is foolish for you to come here in person.” “You could try,” Fire said. The Diamond Dog of Darkness lunged forwards faster than eyes could see, and took a swing which Fire blocked with his shoulder armor. Fire responded by drawing a sword somehow made out of fire, and slicing his attacker in half. That stunned him long enough for Fire to swirl his flame sword around in a pre-practiced pattern that left nothing but little lumps of darkness scattered across the floor, each of them slowly burning to death. As I watched, they rolled over to put out the fires and then started creeping towards each other. Fire incinerated them one by one with his sword, but it took time and enough of them reassembled to flee at the speed of darkness before he finished. The now half-height rebel leader raised his hands. “Okay, okay, you win this one.” Fire smirked, but kept his fire-sword lit and at his side – the other side from me, at least. “You broke rule 1,” he said. “That means that you, personally, are not protected by this cease fire. I hope that lets you sleep easy.” “You can’t blame a diamond dog for going after a fast solution!” the rebel protested. “Besides, the agreement isn’t signed yet.” Fire sighed. “I really, really hate politics.” Eventually I was taken home and given a new rig. Star and Fairy had printed it ahead of time, so it was waiting for me when I got there. I immediately went into VR and launched the trap game, but it seemed kind of hollow. I didn’t really need to be any better at finding traps – diamond dogs didn’t use them. I also didn’t need to keep current on the electronic security training since the diamond dogs didn’t use computers. I needed to know how to vanish from sight better, to pick locks and escape from dungeons, maybe even the social engineering tricks. I also asked Fairy if there was some secret rig I could get so that I wouldn’t have to be so bored if I got captured again. “Well… it’s not normally recommended,” she said, scratching a hindclaw against the floor. “But maybe we should all get one, just in case. We can implant a net connection – I assume that’s what you want? – under the skin. It should be undetectable but it’ll take a surgery.” “That sounds great,” I said. “Why don’t we normally do it?” “It can be hacked as easily as any other rig, and you can’t rip it off if it gets hacked badly,” she said. “But you know how to lock them down, right?” “I mean I know a way to lock them down,” I said. “Most of it is just – nevermind.” Just using settings, I could turn off remote access if I had to go up against Harmony, which was still the biggest threat as far as getting hacked was concerned. Unless I counted Fire, but he was on my side harder than I ever would have wanted someone to be. Fairy laughed. “It’s fine, keep your secrets.” The surgery was pretty unpleasant. We didn’t have a real doctor so Star and Fairy stumbled through the process using local anesthetic which technically worked but they were still drilling holes in my skull to put little nano-dots on my brain. There was probably a better way. I told myself that boring into my skull was worth it to never be bored out my skull again. Also, it was secret spy gear even if the secret was held by the fabber operators instead of the spies. After it was in, I tested it out to make sure it worked, downloaded a few games that worked offline, then locked it down as hard as I could manage so that it would do nothing until I manually changed the settings back. If I just wanted to avert boredom I wouldn’t even need to turn on the net connection, at least for as long as single player games could keep me sane, which was days or hours at least instead of the ‘minutes’ I managed unassisted. “Thank you so much,” I said, that one worry taken off my mind at least. “What do I owe you?” “To make our work useless, and not get captured again,” Star said. “Finish your training before you start going on real missions.” My ears flattened, but, “I guess that’s fair. I’ll have the teacher switch to things that would have been useful.” I was a grumpy loner for a while after that, my nagging software complaining about my ever-increasing solo game time. Steel came by to spar with me sometimes, with me able to give myself the speed of darkness and tentacles in VR for him to practice against ‘Just in case’. The good news was that he was kept in the loop about the war against Harmony, since he was training for it. “So far the alliance has driven the ponies out of the underground entirely, but they’re really dug in in their main camp. There are at least three airships hovering overhead at any time, and they’re not always the same ones.” “I don’t really know why we’re fighting them anyway,” I said. “The ponies are just victims of Harmony, and we’re risking exposing ourselves just to punish them.” “They were going to plant gas bombs in the underground and put us all to sleep,” Steel said. “They’re not here for innocent reasons.” “Let me check something,” I said, marshalling all the scanning and antivirus software I’d found in our records. It wasn’t anything like the darkness’ anti-harmony countermeasures, but it still might at least find out if Steel was infected by darkness. He wasn’t. I was. “Oh crap,” I said. “What? What’s wrong with me?” “Nothing. It’s me. I’ve got traces of the creepy darkness thing all through my rig,” I said. “Antivirus does nothing to them; they’re several generations ahead of us in network architecture.” “So… replace your rig?” he suggested. “I did. It’s a new rig – the rebels smashed my old one. The source of darkness is probably in my brain somewhere, and I’m not willing to destroy and replace my brain. It probably wouldn’t even work.” I paced back and forth in VR. “I think my only hope is Wave or maybe Perro.” “That’s two only hopes,” Steel said. “More than most people get.” “Yeah yeah, count my blessings. Blah.” Wave couldn’t do anything about it. “I still don’t understand their powers well enough. I can suppress the power but I don’t know if that would stop the spread. May Perro can find out more?” “Can you give me a baby warp crystal to shadow aspect?” I asked. “That’s not a small request,” Wave said. “I’ll do it if Perro thinks it would help.” Perro at least showed up in person, instead of just messaging me back. She examined me, walking around and staring at me though her glowing purple and green goggles, and hummed a lot. “I can see the darkness. It’s clinging to your heart, but there are bits of it all through you. I don’t think cutting out the affected places is manageable.” “Can I learn to use it, instead of having it use me?” I asked. “I notice you have the rot crystal – rot can’t be a pleasant personality.” “Yeah, rot wants to destroy everything. I might be able to teach you to control the spirits in the diamond dog style, if you have the talent. It’s a lot more common than warp crystal talent, but –” “I did get the warp crystal to respond!” I protested. “It just bit me instead of obeying me, which apparently doesn’t count.” “I don’t know much about warp technician things, although I’m learning as I raise this crystal.” Perro didn’t regularly accelerate her time by going on the net, so for her this whole situation had only been going on for a few weeks. “But I can test you to see if you can be taught. I already have two apprentices, but there’s no hard limit. Come meet us at our next training session, and we can see if diamond dog magic is something you can use.” Pancakes escorted me to Perro’s teaching room. He kept a close eye on me, closer than on the people around us, but the threat of a guardian dragon still kept anyone from bothering us. Perro’s other apprentices eyed me just as suspiciously. They at least introduced themselves as ‘Serval’ (the fluffy brown one) and ‘Astral’ (shorter furred but black like me, with little purple spots here and there). “Raven,” I said in response, bumping their paws. “At least for now. If I start calling myself the Kobold of Shadows you should be worried.” Perro closed the door, set a rock on a pedestal in the middle of the room, and gingerly handed me her goggles. “Use the purple one to turn the rock into cake,” she said. “I know it sounds like the same test, but it’s trained to do that so it should be much easier. You also don’t have to imagine its form, just draw on its power.” I remembered how it felt to move at the speed of darkness, and to form tentacles, and tried the same thing with the purple stone on the pedestal rock. I lifted it into the air and spun it around, then set it down, thinking ‘turn into cake please?’ Getting off on the wrong foot with the warp stone was probably what had torpedoed my attempt then. “Well, you get it to do something, which means you pass,” Perro said, then cut into the rock with a cake knife. The cake was full of gravel, but edible for diamond dogs. I declined my slice since I couldn’t eat rocks. “This is terrible cake. Normally I pick better candidates to teach, but your situation is unique, so I can train you.” “Yaaay,” Astral said, unenthused. “This is going to take up all my free time in the real world, isn’t it,” I said. “Probably,” Perro admitted. “But you just accelerate the rest and get the time back, so I don’t see why you complain.” Which was fair enough. Meanwhile, my real training proceeded apace with the lockpicking and social engineering modules. Lockpicking was sort of like disarming traps, and served as a nice palette cleanser after I failed time and time again to trick the social engineering targets. I had no talent whatsoever for it, but I was slooowly getting better, at least. I really preferred picking the locks, even if the harder ones needed more and more specialized tools that I’d have to conceal somewhere. Most locks – like if you just asked a fabricator for a generic padlock – just needed slightly bent pieces of metal in a few different sizes and shapes and were essentially trivial. A hairpin already had the right shape for one of the most common rakes if you broke it in the right place. Not that anyone wore hairpins. Except for me, now, and I made sure they weren’t easily visible. Steel and I experimented with sex, to see if the kobold of darkness had actually done anything to fix me instead of just turning me into a sex pest. I was able to do it with me on top, even if he grabbed me harshly , but being on the bottom still made me freeze up, which I suppose was a better response than shoving him off and running. “It didn’t give me anything I asked for,” I complained, after that experiment. “It gave you a little, but yeah,” Steel said. “I hate it,” I scowled. “I hate that I ever felt pity for it. I’m going to learn how to control it, scrape it off my body and trap it in a gem and not feel sorry.” “I hope that works,” Steel said. “I’d hate to see you overshadowed again.” I laughed. “I like that. ‘Overshadowed’.” My diamond dog training went more slowly, since it was all in the real world instead of accelerated time, but Perro managed to convince Serval and Astral to learn unaspected diamond dog magic alongside me instead of having them play around with her pre-trained gems. Unaspected magic used yourself as the power source, so I could see why it was more relevant to my interests. “I don’t suppose you can just scrape all the darkness off me and put it in a baby warp crystal?” I asked. “Maybe you can, when you learn this lesson,” Perro said. I sighed and went back to the meditation exercise. I was *not* good at meditating.
I SpyThings got a bit tense after that. Fire and Star, and the diamond dogs watching the puppies, were always stressed and during one play period we heard two of the caretakers arguing about whether the Alpha was doing the right thing, cracking down on anti-kobold sentiment. Apparently there was anti-kobold sentiment. The next time we woke up, half the puppies were missing. “They go home, to learn like dogs always do,” the remaining caretaker said, with a sigh. “They don’t learn as much, but some dogs think it’s more important to learn the right things.” I was just miserable for a different reason. Perro and Star between them were able to set my broken bones and knit them together quickly – they were mostly things like ribs and shoulder blades that weren’t easily replaced with cybernetics anyway – but I spent an extra week in school while everyone else got put back in reality to play, because it would have been too painful. I was still pretty sore the week after, but it was bearable, at least according to Star who didn’t have to bear it. There weren’t a lot of physical sensations in our accelerated virtual world, so the only thing I felt for almost a year was pain. I’d heard the stories about how Star cut off their arms and legs on purpose to get them replaced with robot limbs, and I was starting to think that maybe I wanted to do something similar. But it did get better, eventually, and just as I was finally starting to get used to the idea of enjoying life again, we graduated. Star and Wave, of all people, were there to greet us, along with Wave’s dragon-friend and their gaggle of baby half-dragons, who were lurking around looking menacing, all spiky fur and horns and teeth. “Congratulations!” Star said. “You’re now all officially adults. You’re old enough to pick a name, and an icon, and a specialized field of study!” “And old enough to make decisions on your own,” Wave added. “Once you’re registered, you’ll have full control over your own rig.” “This is a big responsibility!” Star said. “But don’t worry, we can guide you through everything, as much as you need. We’re here to help!” “Where’s Fire?” asked Eff. There were some other mumbles from the crowd. “He’s… busy,” Star said. “He’s in the palace,” the dragon said, “ruling the pack.” “That idiot!” Wave said, throwing up her hands. “What happened?” Ay asked. “Are we taking over? Should we start breeding an army of kobolds to devour the world now?” “If you want!” Star said. “But no we’re not taking over.” “Aren’t we?” Wave asked. The dragon shook her head, and explained for the rest of us, “They found a big nest of rebels, and rumor said it was where they were holding the warp crystal. The Alpha and his guards went in to get it back. It was a trap, the crystal wasn’t there, and the Alpha was killed.” “Fire finished off the surviving rebels, and everyone on our side who got killed was brought back. Perro’s spell worked just like it was supposed to!” Star said. “But the diamond dogs have a rule,” the dragon said. “Whoever kills the Alpha is the new Alpha. Being brought back from the dead doesn’t change that. Fire killed the dog who killed the Alpha, so he’s Alpha right now.” “If they don’t have to die permanently, can’t the Alpha just kill Fire and let us bring him back?” Ay asked. “You would think!” Wave shouted, throwing up her hands again. “But no, Fire wants to make some changes first.” “He just wants to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Star said. “He’s an idiot,” the dragon said. “If the conservatives weren’t protecting him, he’d already have been assassinated.” “I’d like to see them try!” Star said, “Actually no I wouldn’t, too many people would die. I don’t get why they’re on our side though?” “They’re not,” Wave said, mouth-line changing to a jagged sawblade. “But they think arranging for a fight with a predetermined conclusion is cheating.” The adults seemed to finally notice that we were all staring at them. Star gave a big, jagged grin, and said, “If any of you weren’t completely confused or annoyed by all that talk of politics, I know *just* the specialty for you!” “We have to register everyone first before we start assigning jobs,” Wave said. “I know,” Star said, their faceplate changing into a spinning star. “I’m the one who looked up the procedure, and I’m the one who’s going to have to do it. Just make sure your demon-babies don’t devour the puppies while I get them processed.” For some reason, the procedure had to be done in the real world despite almost none of it affecting the real world in any way. I think it was because they were changing all my settings and needed to completely reboot my account or something like that. “Alright, CeeCee,” Star said. “This is pretty simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. I just need your name, icon, gender if any, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits.” “Raven Darktalon of the Endless Abyss,” I said. “I need a one word name that represents your icon,” Star said, patiently. “You can set your display name to Raven Darktalon of the… um… you can set it to whatever you want afterwards. Raven and Talon would both work, there are good icons for those.” “Raven, then,” I said, flattening my ears. I didn’t realize they *forced* our names to be boring. “Alright, here are the raven-related icons from the library,” Star said, and an array of twenty different birds and bird heads and feathers spread out across my faceplate. “Unless you had something else in mind? You can also draw one if you want.” I was pretty sure I couldn’t draw a raven to save my life, so I picked one that looked appropriately menacing. “Can I change it later?” “Technically yes?” Star said. “It’s the same procedure to change it as I’m using to set it right now, so if you change your mind by the time I’m finished with everyone it’ll be no trouble. Otherwise it’ll be some trouble, so you can figure it out yourself. Gender?” “Huh?” “Are you a girl or a boy or both or neither or undecided?” Star asked. “I didn’t know that was a setting,” I said. Star shrugged. “It’s not but Wave wanted me to ask. You’re a girl, aren’t you?” “I guess,” I said. “Okay, I’ll mark you down as ‘girl, I guess ’. Now, what color do you want to set your rig to? That’s easier to change but it’s easier on everyone else if you don’t.” “Black of course.” “No, I mean the glowy bits,” Star said. “Black.” “No,” Star said, deadpan. “You can’t have your rig show your face and icons in black. No one would be able to see it.” I pouted. “But ravens are black!” “They aren’t,” said the dragon, startling me. I hadn’t realized she was listening. “I like working with their feathers. They’re kind of black but also a bunch of different colors.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it.” “Huh,” Star said. “She’s kind of right.” She sent me a packet of pictures of ravens, and I flipped through them. I’d seen most of them before, but now that I was looking… yeah. They were black at first glance, but a glossy black and the gloss was all different colors. A very dark-hued rainbow. “Like a rainbow of darkness,” I said. “Can I do that?” “We can try!” Star said. It ended up looking a little too rainbow for me, so we filtered out the warm colors and kept it to greens and blues and purples, and turned it down as far as we could to still have it visible. “Alright, Raven,” Star said. “Give it half an hour to propagate before you try to access anything, or things could get weird. Can you send Dee in next?” I didn’t respond, staring at the little raven on my thigh. It shifted colors as I moved. I loved it! “Raven?” Star asked again. “Raven!” she tapped me on the shoulder. “Huh?” “Can you send Dee in next?” “Right! Sorry,” I said. I was going to have to get used to a new name. That’d probably take more than half an hour. I was still showing off my icon to the other new adults when Dee screamed from behind me, “CeeCee get back here!” “There’s no one by that name!” I shouted back. She stomped over to me. “You stole my name!” “What?” She poked me in the chest. “I wanted to be Raven and Star says we can’t both have the same name! Just change your name to Talon.” I shook my head. “I like Raven better.” “You always do this! You stole my name, you stole my chance at the warp crystal, you stole my stuffed lizard…” “It’s not my fault you’re always a little too late,” I said. Stuffed lizard? Was she still complaining about something that happened when we were six? “It’s Fire’s fault for giving you a later number,” said Eff. “And Star and Wave for always going in order.” “It’s not Fire’s fault, he picked at random,” Star said, coming over to join us. “It’s just bad luck.” “You’re nothing like a raven anyway,” I said. “Ravens are quiet and watch people, you’re always nagging and complaining.” “And you’re always stealing things and running off!” I grinned. “Am I? Like some sort of… small bird…” She bared her claws, cacked her faceplate, and leaped on me, clawing and biting. We wrestled around a bit until the dragon came over and separated us. I sat there on the ground, faceplate blank, trying to back down from a sudden panic. I slowly took stock of myself… a few scratches, but no bleeding. No broken bones. She hadn’t – she wasn’t like those dogs, she hadn’t really been trying to hurt me. She couldn’t have known… Eff looked down at me. “Did you piss yourself? I mean, that was a good pounce, but…” “Shut up!” I snapped, and ran off to clean up. “Cat,” she said, creeping up behind me in the shower. The shower was just a spigot on the wall down on the fabricator level, so it wasn’t like it was supposed to be private. I spun around. “I picked Cat,” she said. Her face was pink. Bright. Pink. She turned to show off her icon, which was the outline of a cat, crouching down to pounce. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Oh well, my version was prettier anyway. “Aren’t black cats bad luck?” I asked, scrubbing myself off a bit. “Yep,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to give bad luck to other people.” “It wasn’t bad luck, you were just after me numerically,” I said. Then realized, “Oh god, you picked Cat because it was near the start of the alphabet, didn’t you!” She grinned, and gave me a little wave as she headed back up. I spent a long time cleaning off, because I really didn’t want to go back up and face everyone. By now Eff – or whatever he called himself now – would have told everyone, and maybe I could just live my whole life down here in the fabricator… except no, Star would be down here eventually to build something, and I was sure Ay – I mean Fairy – would want to be her apprentice, so that was at least two people I’d need to face… So eventually I skulked back up to the lounge, where everyone was talking to Star and Wave as they described the different specialties we could study, or else reading up on them on their own since there was a swarm of us compared to the two of them. The dragon was watching the dragon babies who were play-fighting or gnawing on the furniture. I didn’t really know why they acted so immature, they used accelerated learning just like us and the puppies. Wave waved me over. “Oh, that is pretty!” she said, looking at my icon. “Did you decide what you wanted to study? We still don’t have a real doctor. Doctors get to cut people open and play around with their insides, that sounds fun doesn’t it?” “I want to be a warp technician,” I said. “Obviously.” “Obviously, that’s not going to happen,” Warp replied. “You don’t have the talent and we don’t have a warp crystal to train you on anyway. Even if I took back the baby one I gave Perro it isn’t ready to train a newbie.” “Then I’ll go get the other one back,” I said. “I don’t think you realize how dangerous these people are,” Wave said. “This isn’t a movie where a plucky kid can waltz into the villain’s base and steal their treasure right out from under their nose. And if you’re planning to copy Fire and go in with heavy weapons…” she stopped dead. “Forget I said anything. You’d just end up killing yourself.” “I’m an adult now,” I said. “You can’t stop me.” “Cinder, stop her,” she said, and suddenly I was dangling from the dragon’s claws. “Alright, if you’re going to be like that you can play with the other children,” said the dragon – Cinder, I guess – before dumping me in the middle of the little half-dragon babies. Who were larger than they’d looked, sitting next to Cinder – they were almost as big as me, and much much pointier. “Ha,” said one of them, brown-furred with gray stripes. “What are you in for?” I looked around. Nothing was restraining any of them. “What am I in?” “In trouble,” they explained. “We’re all grounded because we set the cushions on fire.” Something started gnawing on my tail. “And biff Snaff’s tail,” mumbled the baby dragon chewing on my tail. They weren’t chewing very hard, at least. “How long are you grounded for?” I asked, turning to pet the little fluffy dragon behind me. They made happy noises. “They’re grounded until they molt,” Cinder said. “If they never molt, then they’re grounded forever.” “Forever?!” I said, eye-spots wide. She looked confused. “Well, yeah. If they don’t molt they won’t grow wings, so how can they fly?” “How long are they being punished?” I asked. The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask Wave.” I spent a few hours playing with the dragon babies. They really were just kids – they’d taken so long to hatch, and hadn’t really been able to get any virtual training in the egg because of the level of heat they needed while they were incubating (Cinder explained). They were getting accelerated training now that they were out, as much as they could manage to make up for lost time, but after a year they were still only about eight. I mostly talked to Pancakes, and Cinder who kept butting in but was mostly helpful when she did. Soufflé eventually got bored of chewing on my tail but not of being petted, so I let them sit in my lap. I was a little jealous that they’d gotten real egg names, but not very jealous of what those names actually were – and Wave would have been one of the ones naming us, so maybe we’d dodged a bullet. The other four had been named by Cinder, and she’d given them random gem names, which was a little better. Pancakes was completely obsessed with a mining game where you had to dig for randomly generated resources in an infinite cavern system, so we mostly talked about that. I’d played it a little, but I’d always been more interested in the Labyrinth simulator. They were similar enough for us to trade stories of things we’d found, at least – he really liked the idea of a giant chasm connecting multiple levels; apparently that didn’t happen very often in their game. Eventually, Wave came back to talk to me. It was time for her and Cinder and the dragon babies to go back to the palace, so they had to let me go. “Have you decided on a specialty you can actually train for?” she asked. “If it turns out you’re able to use a warp crystal, you can always switch, but there’s no way to even start that training now.” “That’s why I wanted to go find it,” I said. “Isn’t that more important than training?” “We already have a lot of people looking,” Wave said. “We’ll find it sooner or later. And I’m not going to have you wandering through the mines on your own so you can get attacked again!” I perked an ear at that. “So come with me?” She shook her head. “I have other duties, and someone needs to talk sense into Fire. I also couldn’t protect you. Cinder is here because someone needed to protect *me*.” I looked at Cinder, and she shook her head. “I have the same other duties as Wave.” “Fine,” I said, sulking. “And don’t think you can just wait until we leave and sneak out,” Wave said. “I may not have the crystal with me, but I can still track your headset.” “FINE,” I said, sulking more. “I think I know what I want to study then.” She looked surprised. “Oh?” “I want to learn how to sneak,” I said. “And how to hack computers – erasing records, making cameras ignore you, faking tracking data, that sort of thing.” She glowered at me. “What? Did someone else pick computer security?” I said, trying to look innocent with a giant grin. “I give up,” she said, turning her back on me. “Come on, Cinder, let’s get back to the menagerie. The Alpha’s probably getting really bored since he doesn’t have a job right now.” But at least she sent me the link to the espionage training, which covered physical sneaking and electronic infiltration (and a bunch of other stuff that I wasn’t as interested in). Apparently it was actually a thing. The sneaking training was more interesting than I’d expected. It was a lot like the labyrinth simulator, except that I wasn’t always in a labyrinth and instead of getting past the traps and fighting or tricking the monsters, I had to get past everyone unnoticed. For a while this meant ‘literally unseen and unheard’, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out what I was supposed to do at least although actually doing it took a while. Every time I failed, I’d be captured, tied up in some humiliating way, and the teacher of the classroom portion would explain to the class (which was just me) what I’d done wrong and how to do better next time. Yes, all the training was accelerated. We – the former kids – had all gotten together to talk about our schedule, and we decided pretty quickly that we wanted to stay in sync with each other, so we’d all be done with our training at the same time and could start working on the next generation. It took a little longer to settle on the ‘half on/half off’ schedule that we’d been forced to use before, where the ‘half’ that was on would end up being most of our lives since it was accelerated. I was one of the ones arguing for it, since I wanted to speed through my training until I was confident I could sneak past Wave’s tracking (and any diamond dogs in the mines who wanted to beat me up ). There were a couple of people who wondered why we weren’t starting on the next generation now, but most of us wanted *some* free time and on balance we decided to stick with the wisdom of hundreds of generations of kobolds before us who told us to wait until we were done with training. One of the reasons we wanted free time was that we were able to go to the full virtual world now, the one with senses and avatars that felt as detailed as real life, but that only ran at normal speed so we couldn’t squeeze very much of it in in the breaks between classes that used to be playground time. The games weren’t really that much better – games had always been able to sleazily improve the sensory feedback without overloading the processors or our brains – but it was the sort of place where you could make your own fun, which for a bunch of kobolds newly off the leash often meant sex. I… tried it once. I noticed that Steel and Honor were also running the same combat tracker I’d had to install, and we went off alone so they could show me their moves. I hadn’t actually learned any fighting yet, so I mostly watched them fight each other, while they pointed out what techniques they were using – which were all pretty simple, since they’d only just started training too. Steel won, reducing his opponent’s hit points to zero with a few solid hits. “Ha! Good fight,” he said, helping Honor back up. She fiddled with her settings to bring herself back to full health. “We should play for stakes.” “Like what?” Steel asked. Honor smirked. “Winner gets to screw the loser?” “So what, either way you both screw each other?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem like much of an incentive.” “Alright then,” Honor said. “Winner gets to screw you. Fighting over a girl is a long and proud tradition!” “…in fiction,” Steel said. “What, are you scared you’ll have to watch us having fun?” Honor asked. Steel looked up at me. “Are you okay with this?” “Uh…” I blushed, which was mostly an ear thing although my faceplate displayed it too. “Yes?” I’d been waiting for someone to ask me, and this was probably as close as I was going to get. “Readysetgo!” Honor blurted out, whirling into a kick that she probably hoped would land before Steel was ready, but he caught it and threw her into a wall. There were a few more exchanges before she gave up, but it was obvious that Steel outclassed her. He actually had Honor beat in all three physical stats in the tracker; that had to be really frustrating for her if it made as much of a difference as it seemed to. “Ugh, fine, I’ll just sit here and play with myself,” she said. Steel walked over to me and held out his hand, helping me down from the wall I was sitting on and pulling me into a hug. He cracked his faceplate, and I followed his lead, and we kissed… That part was really nice. Then he laid me down on the ground, with him on top, and his cock teased at my sex and it felt so good for about three seconds before I started to panic and teleported away. He sent me a message later, apologizing for ‘pressuring me into something I wasn’t ready for’, and reassured me that he’d been able to have his fun with Honor so I didn’t need to feel bad about backing out. I still felt terrible. I wasn’t scared of the sex at all – I’d been excited at the thought. But when he got on top of me like that… I was back in mine, about to be beat within an inch of my life, and the fact that I was in the virtual world and getting punched would just deduct hit points and wouldn’t really hurt didn’t matter to whatever was apparently driving me insane. And then word got around and no one ever approached me for sex, assuming I hated it, and I didn’t want to explain what had actually happened because that was even more humiliating than being asexual. I started spending my virtual time as a literal raven, which was too small for people to even hug, not that hugs had ever set me off yet. I was terrified that they’d start, so I just avoided all close contact. I threw myself back into my training, and let the sheer blinding terror of being caught drive me to work harder. I’d apparently made a good impression on Pancakes and Soufflé, because they invited me over to play the mining game with them. It was an accelerated game (of course it was; they were still kids and only got to play accelerated games) so I could play it during accelerated downtime between classes. I hadn’t ever tried it before because it *didn’t* improve the graphics, instead (I found out now) opting for a more realistic physics system and fully destructible terrain. Destructible also meant craftable, and the dragon babies had made a full-size copy of the palace where they lived, although the real palace probably didn’t have jagged zigzag walls on the diagonal passageways. Or maybe it did? We’d seen the palace from a distance on the way to the arena, and the lava moat was authentic at least. “Don’t jump in the lava,” Pancakes warned me. “You’re not a dragon so you’ll burn up.” “Can you jump in the lava?” I asked, looking down over the edge. The virtual lava didn’t look very threatening in this game, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t deadly. Pancakes nodded. “Yeah. Cinder says we can swim in lava because we’re dragons even though we have fur and kobold ears and other parts. Bright Star said it’s because we have dragon magic and kobolds don’t have any magic so we only have dragon magic so we’re dragons but if we were part pony we’d have more pony magic because ponies have more magic than dragons so we’d be ponies.” “Ponies can eat rocks,” Souffle added, “but they don’t like to.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that, but I wasn’t going to argue with a little kid. “Kobolds can eat rocks but we have to make them into food first,” I said. For some reason that made them both giggle a lot. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted so I kind of sulked until they were finished laughing. They showed me the chasm they’d been working on, which was impressively deep although it wasn’t as wide as the ones that showed up in the labyrinth simulator. We hopped down from ledge to ledge until we got near the bottom, where a swarm of spiders and skeletons were walking back and forth. Pancakes didn’t have fire breath in the game, but he did have a bunch of bombs, and we threw them at enemies for a while but didn’t really seem to be making a dent. It did blow holes in the walls, though, and the dragons thought it would be a great idea to make the chasm wider by planting bombs everywhere… So yeah. It was fun. It wasn’t long before the sneaking class moved on from the initial ‘literally being quiet and unseen’ part, and switched over to social engineering – blending in with crowds, talking your way past guards, that sort of thing. “I can’t really blend in with the crowds here,” I said to the teacher, interrupting them. “Can we study electronic security first?” The teacher paused in their explanation. “It would be possible to re-order the lesson plan, but we would need to have a consensus from all the students.” I looked around the otherwise empty classroom. “I, um, I agree that we should do the computer stuff first?” “Very well,” they said. “Since it’s unanimous.” One of the first lessons was about the security settings of our rigs. “As you can see,” the teacher said, as I looked at my own settings, “the default settings put a lot of trust in your friends. For most people, this is convenient – you want your friends to know where you are, or to be able to send and receive files. But who are your friends? How does it know? The unfortunate answer is that it guesses, and it errs on the side of including more people.” “By default we can look at our friends’ logs?” I asked, spotting a particularly suspicious setting. “There’s no UI for it, but yes, with a simple script like this…” I spent the next free period abusing that script. My friends list had basically everyone on it – all the other kobolds of my generation, Fire, Star, and Wave, Cinder, Pancakes, Souffle, four assorted half-dragons named after gems, Perro, Lupe who I recognized as one of the caretakers, and about a dozen other diamond dogs that I assumed were some of the puppies. Wow, he hadn’t been kidding about it being overzealous. I started with Five, because I wanted to know why they’d wanted to name themselves Five and why Star had let them. The script took a time index so I set it to the day we’d all chosen names, then fast-forwarded through the resulting window until it got to their turn. The log replayer had a checklist of senses to experience, but I stuck to sight and sound and had it put the result in a window. “Four! It’s your turn!” came Star’s voice. The viewpoint walked over to the slightly remote area where we’d discussed our future. Star smiled at the camera. “There’s only a few things to fill out, so your part should be very easy. I just need your name, icon, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits. I’ll also note down your gender for Wave, if that’s okay?” “I want to be both genders,” came Four’s voice. “That’s what we are and anything else is just pretending.” “Oh, I thought you were a girl,” Star said. “I like the girl pronouns better.” Star smiled. “I think Wave is the same way. Have you thought about a name?” “Kind of…” she said. “I mean, it’s stupid, but it’s always bothered me that there was a Zero, One, Two, Three, and Four, but no Five.” Star looked confused. “Can I be named Five?” “I don’t see why not,” Star said. “There should be plenty of five-related icons…” There were. One of them was the number ‘five’, and it flashed as she selected it. I stopped the playback. That had been significantly less interesting than I’d hoped. And yet… just watching through their eyes like that… I felt a little thrill. And the option had been there for so many other senses… I scanned through my own logs to find the exact time, then ran the script to fetch Steel’s logs from the incident. Excitement tingled through my fur as I checked the boxes next to all the recorded sensory info… I looked up at myself, sitting on a wall, looking embarrassed but not terrified, not yet. My hand reached up to help myself down, and then we kissed… I felt myself starting to get hard, my arms reached around to take me in my grasp, and I lowered myself to the floor, heart racing in eager excitement. There was some fumbling as I tried to get the aim right, while my upper body just stayed pressed close to myself, and then I fell a few inches as I disappeared from beneath myself. “What the fuck,” I said in Steel’s voice. “She bolted.” “She looked pretty terrified,” Honor said from across the room. She’d been masturbating up until a few seconds ago, and her fingers were still wet. “I guess it’s her first time.” “I can’t believe she just bailed like that,” I said, anger burning in my chest and ears. “I mean – I don’t want to force her but that was really rude. What’s wrong with her anyway?” “I don’t know, you know her better than me,” Honor said. “I wouldn’t take it personally, though.” “It’s hard not to.” I felt my ears flatten, as my erection slowly subsided. I was still super horny though. “Oh, don’t be like that,” she said, getting up and kneeling in front of me, taking my cock in her hands and stroking it, coaxing it harder and then taking it into her mouth, her tongue squirming around it while I gasped and grabbed on to her head between her ears. “What are you –” I started to say, then moaned instead. She pulled back and sealed her faceplate. “Do you want me to stop?” My head shook back and forth. She went back to work… and slipped her finger down to slide into my vagina, all slippery and sensitive already, thrusting in sync with her tongue’s caress. It didn’t take long before my arousal peaked, and I fell back onto my tail, quivering and clenching around her fingers as my cock pulsed in her mouth. “What was that?” I asked, lying back in the afterglow. “A good start,” she said. I glanced down to see her evil grin, before she slid up on top of me, pinning me down while her cock thrust into my pussy, driving me to cry out her name and convulse in pleasure again as she moaned, “Steel… yes…” and her thrusts became erratic but firmer for a few seconds before her warmth spread through me. We lay there in each other’s arms, her on top of me, pinning me to the ground, and it was wonderful. I stopped the playback and sat there with my head spinning for a while, before I started to cry, ragged sobs of shame and loss. Why was I so broken? I rewound the log to the point where Honor started to suck Steel’s cock and played through it again. If I’d remembered that I was allowed to turn off the nagging software, I might have gotten totally reward-locked by my voyeurism. There were a lot of logs of kobolds having sex, especially when I figured out how to query the intensity of sexual pleasure over time so that I could go right to the key moments and experience the good parts, usually from both sides but sometimes from all three sides or all five sides or whatever. But I‘d left the nagging software on, and it reminded me to get some sleep, and when the next between-class period rolled around it reminded me that I’d spent the entirety of the previous session on solitary activities and should really go talk to people. It certainly hadn’t felt solitary! But I suppose that just means that it was an especially dangerous temptation. I didn’t go visit Pancakes and Souffle. They were too young to talk about sex and I *really* wanted to talk about sex. I mean… what I actually wanted was to *have* sex, myself, where I could control my actions instead of just being along for the ride. I wanted to prove that I *could* have sex. I wanted to share the script I’d been using so that maybe I could watch the recordings with other people and talk about them afterwards. I wanted to keep it a secret so no one would know that I’d been spying on them – that was rule number one of being a spy! Don’t admit that you’re spying on people. They don’t make things ‘rule number one’ if they’re easy. I decided I’d go see Steel, because he was one of my closest friends (although not, I will note, vice versa) and because he was phony enough that I was confident he wouldn’t call me out to my face, so I’d be able to spy on what he said about me once I was gone, and yell at him then, displaced in time and space so that he was guaranteed not to catch on. He was in the avatar builder, which wasn’t really a place but I teleported to him anyway and existed alongside him as a disembodied presence overlooking an extremely detailed model of a diamond dog. “Raven,” he said, not letting me break his concentration. He seemed to be focusing on getting the combat characteristics right, which wasn’t something you had to do with the avatars – by default they’d leave your response to other peoples’ attacks effectively up to you. “Hey, Steel,” I said. Queue awkward pause. He didn’t respond right away, but after a couple of minutes he finished the fiddly bit he was working on, and exited out so that we could look at each other, albeit in the low-resolution bodies we used in accelerated time. They’d updated with our new names and icons, at least, although they didn’t bother with color. He sat down against something that was supposed to represent a giant mushroom. “To what do I owe this occasion?” “It never used to be an occasion when I came to talk to you,” I said, standing there fidgeting. “You never used to avoid me for weeks on end,” he said. “I guess you’re safer here.” “It’s not that,” I said. “I’ve never felt unsafe around you.” “Right,” he said. “Just disgusted at the thought of touching you.” I laughed, nervously. “I’ve definitely never felt *that*. I want –” I squirmed. “I want to have sex. Everyone assumes I don’t and it’s getting old.” His mouth got a bit jaggy. “We can’t have sex in accelerated time, so it seems odd that you’d come to me now.” “My nagging software told me I was spending too much time alone,” I admitted. He looked confused. “Nagging software?” “Star made me run it after I started spending too much time alone, way back when our parents actually cared about us,” I said. “I sort of assumed they gave it to everyone.” “Oh, the reminder app,” he said. “Running through labyrinths again? It’s more fun with friends.” “It’s more annoying with friends,” I said, scowling. I’d never liked people watching me mess up the traps and get killed, and I guess I’d never gotten back around to doing it with other people once I was no longer so terrible at it. “But no, I was, um.” I paused. “Having sex?” “In accelerated time?” he asked. “Did someone make a sex game that works here?” “Ehhh, no,” I said. “I was…” I waffled a bit, then sent him a file. “Here.” “Snakes?” he asked, apparently playing it back like we normally played back our logs, visual and audio only. “What are they – oh!” “Yeah,” I said, curling my tail around in front of me. I’d sent him one of my favorites – Fairy and Cat in snake avatars, coiled nose-to-tail and licking each others’ cloacas. There was so much close contact, even if the sexual pleasure was fairly subdued… “They sent you a log of them fucking each other?” he asked. “Were they trying to seduce you or insult you?” “I like that one because it’s something I can’t do in person without panicking and running away,” I said, not answering the question. “Whenever someone holds me like that, I panic. Ever since the diamond dogs – don’t tell anyone! Please!” “So that’s why you don’t want to touch anyone?” He tilted his head. “How are you planning to have sex without touching anyone?” “I think I might be okay if I was on top,” I said. “I want to try a few things and I want you to let me try again if I panic and that means I have to tell you that I panic and I don’t want everyone to know.” “So why did you come to *me*?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like you?” He gave me a neutral look, for a bit. “You should ask Honor,” he said eventually. “She’s a lot more patient about things like this.” “Huh?” “You want someone who’ll let you experiment with sex in various positions, even after you panic and run off a few times,” Steel said. “That would drive me insane.” “Huh,” I said. “Yeah, I guess you get frustrated easily. I bet your combat training would really make you mad if you didn’t always win.” “I don’t always win!” he said, looking embarrassed. “And there was an entire week teaching us to be good sports about losing.” “Yeah,” I said. “Just like the entire week spent teaching me not to hum sneaking music when I’m trying to be stealthy, I bet.” He snorted, pulling his hands up to cover his mouth. “Really?” “It’s harder than it sounds!” Unfortunately, I’d used all my courage approaching Steel , so when the weekend rolled around and we had non-accelerated time that I could have used trying to have sex with Honor, I just hung out with random people in public areas instead. Mostly in real life, actually – I decided I should get some real-world sneaking practice in so I practiced sneaking around our lair without being noticed. I managed to startle a few people! Near the end of the day Fairy and Pear were flirting with each other, and when they were about to go off into the virtual world and have sex, I asked if I could come watch. “Sure,” Fairy said. “Are you sure you don’t want to join in?” “No,” I said. Somehow, they took that as ‘no I don’t want to join in’ so I just ended up watching them make out for a while, perching on a branch overhead. After they were both relaxing in the aftermath of some very weird sex – Pear had turned themself into a giant pear, that Fairy was able to take bites out of, but had their own giant mouth with blunt teeth that they were using to gnaw on her leg – Pear asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to join. “Even just for a taste?” “Um… sure,” I said, and flew down to peck at their skin. It was sweet. I don’t know if it tasted anything like a real pear, and Pear probably didn’t know either. “I mostly came so I’d have a log I could look at later. You don’t mind, do you?” “Why would we mind?” Fairy said, wiping some juice off her chin. “I’m sorry if this isn’t to your taste.” “It’s not what I was expecting,” I admitted. Mostly, I’d just wanted to make sure that people were okay with me looking at logs – privacy wasn’t a big thing for most kobolds, but we were supposed to respect it if people asked. I was too shy to admit how much I’d actually been spying, though. “Buuut…” Fairy said, grinning, “If you’re going to masturbate to us, could you do it while we watch?” For safety, the virtual sex program didn’t let you masturbate; it was too close to reward-locking yourself, especially if you abused the settings to maximize orgasms. You could stimulate yourself a little, but you’d never actually reach a peak. “I don’t think we’re allowed?” I said. “Not in here, no,” Fairy said. “I bet no one’s in the nursery though, if you don’t want anyone else to see.” I logged off, and woke up in the lounge, blushing furiously. Fairy and Pear were on another couch nearby, and turned to stare at me, grinning. Half a dozen other kobolds and at least four diamond dogs mostly didn’t notice anything, at least until I spread my legs, and reached down to my crotch, stroking the fur there to stimulate myself a bit. “Why wouldn’t I want anyone else to see?” I asked. “See what?” Rain asked. “See her masturbate!” Fairy said enthusiastically. I hadn’t actually masturbated in a while… but I still remembered the mechanics, from sex-ed. Tease the sensitive area until the cock emerged from my slit, then stroke it gently with my hands, until it was long enough to wrap my fingers around, then work it up and down in a steady motion… I leaned back and closed my eyes, focusing on the sensation and on my own arousal. I yelped as something slid into my vagina – I was wet, of course, so it didn’t hurt, but I still yelled, “Cat!” as I saw her kneeling in front of me, sliding a soft plastic rod back out of my sex. “What are you doing?” “I’m not touching you!” she said, with a grin, shoving it back inside. I jerked, and my legs spread wider as if of their own accord. “I’m just giving you a gift,” she said, as she continued to stoke it in and out of my pussy, smoothly. “If you’re going to masturbate you need toys, right?” I screamed as my cock spurted up into the air, splattering down on my chest and faceplate, and convulsed around the toy just like I’d felt ‘myself’ convulse around a cock in a dozen logs. Cat didn’t stop, though, continuing to work her toy, triggering a series of smaller orgasms until I planted a foot on her chest and pushed her away, exhausted and oversensitive. The flopping toy landed on my chest with a wet slap. It took me a while to come back to myself enough to grab hold of it. “What a show!” Fairy said. “Who’s next?” But then the timer went off on all of our faceplates simultaneously – the weekend was over, and it was time to go back to school.
Adventure PartyI made my first run for the warp crystal in the middle of the week. I set all my permissions to private, and kept glancing occasionally at Wave’s log until she was otherwise occupied. Then I popped out of the virtual world, and hurried quickly but quietly to the lair’s exit, since time moved so fast in the real world. The labyrinth was a piece of cake – the traps were meant primarily for training, and even the diamond dogs had to go in and out occasionally. I got all the way through with no trouble, and found that the door was shut, and wouldn’t open. I tugged on the handle anyway, in case it was just stuck, and a screen lit up on the wall next to me, showing Star’s faceplate. “Just a sec, I’ll buzz you – Raven? Shouldn’t you be in class?” “I just need to go out into the mines for a bit,” I said. “Sorry,” Star said. “I can’t let you do that.” “Yes you can!” I said. “I promise I won’t get hurt!” Their faceplate turned into a spinning star. “Look, Wave and Fire and I talked this over, and you’re not ready to face off with the rebels. I’d like to say that you’ll never be ready, but if they’re still a problem by the time you graduate we really will need a spy.” “So you locked us all in prison just in case I tried to escape?” “No,” Star said. “The door’s to keep the rebels out. They’re mostly miners, which means the mines aren’t safe. Our traps would *probably* be enough but we didn’t want to risk it, so we added a door. If they break down the door, all the traps go into lethal mode. So don’t break down the door. One of the traps is *on* the door and since I’m the closest thing we have to a doctor, I’ll be the one who has to sew your bits back together.” “A door? To stop diamond dogs?” I asked. “Can’t they just dig around?” Star’s faceplate turned into a very jagged grin. “They can try.” I slunk back through the maze, and changed all my permissions back in case no one had noticed yet. Unless I wanted to wait until the class got around to teaching lockpicking, this was going to take a little more planning. We’d all heard the story of how Nightwing used Fire’s logs to figure out how (and that) he’d blown up her airship. So that was my first thought. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to spend a real-time month watching everything that had happened in his life , even assuming that he’d been the one to put in whatever trap was supposed to keep out diamond dog diggers. I’d had a few more electronic security lectures, though, and one of the things they’d suggested and/or warned about was the logs kept by the fabricator. They were easy enough to get by looking at each machine individually – that was a thing normal, non-spy people did sometimes – but a fabricator had a lot of machines, and one of my homework assignments was to write a script to query them all and flag anomalies. Most of the anomalies were boring – they were just jobs people had run to print things that were rarely used, or things where someone had ordered an unusually large quantity of something normally printed out in ones or twos. I was just using the default algorithm, which wasn’t the best possible implementation but was probably better than I could do on my own. Our collective was small, at least, so even the full verbose list was useful. Yes, I had to flip through page after page of irrelevant things like the dildo Cat had printed out, but eventually I found a likely culprit – burrowing robots that could lay wires in solid rock without having to dig out a conduit. Star had printed out *hundreds* of them, shortly after I’d been attacked. Then I went to peek at their logs, to see what they’d done with them. A few minutes later, I downloaded their map of the buried electrocution net, to see if there were any weak points. “Hey, Steel,” I said. Steel was busy dueling against a stationary target, frozen in an A-pose. “Raven.” “You know some diamond dogs, right?” “A few,” he said, lowering his pistol. “We spar with each other sometimes.” “What are they like?” I asked. “Do you trust them? Are there any you’d want to take with you on an adventure? I mean, hypothetically.” “Hypothetically.” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s not like I’d really bring one with me on an adventure. I’m not even allowed to have adventures.” “We’re not supposed to care about what we’re allowed to do,” he said, flipping his pistol up and instantly squeezing off a shot. The target survived, but the simulation put up a trace of where the bullet had gone – too high, and a bit to the left. “And yet, I’m trapped here,” I said. “There’s a door on the labyrinth now. We’re locked in.” “So you want to find someone to dig around it for you,” he said. “That shouldn’t be hard.” “it’s a little harder than that,” I said. “I mean, theoretically. Star knows that diamond dogs exist, so they wouldn’t have put up a door if you could just dig out safely. Another reason not to take a diamond dog on an adventure!” “And hypothetically, a kobold training to be a spy might know how to get around that trap,” Steel said. “Well, no one knows how deep the garbage pit is, so Star would have had to leave a hole for it,” I said. “Hypothetically or actually?” “Um…” I said. Maybe I should have done the social part of the espionage course. “Actually. I found the plans.” “I’m going with you,” Steel said. He whipped his gun up from his hip, and shot at the target again. This time it somehow managed to go right between its legs. “I… don’t have any reason to object to that?” I said, uncertainly, because my instincts were telling me it was a bad idea. “Do you have a way to get through the garbage? It’s not safe to just wade through it.” “I have a general plan?” I said. “I thought… we could wear hazmat suits, and bring some soap and water to wash off afterwards. Wash us off, in case we get some on us taking off the suits. The suits just get tossed.” “Can a diamond dog dig with a suit on?” Steel asked. “Fuck.” I tried to think of a better way. “Portable airlock?” “No, that was a serious question,” Steel said. “They dig with magic, right?” Steel’s recommendation for a diamond dog party member was a puppy named Pepper. She was one of the not-uncommon puppies who’d been learning with us from the beginning, and had been born long before we’d been hatched, but was still younger than us because of how acceleration worked for them and because we’d gotten a head-start in the egg. She was in her real-world phase – the puppies weren’t always in phase with us, because their caretakers preferred to deal with them in shifts – which meant dropping into the real world and going into the puppy part of the lair… and wasting most of our free time that day, but whatever. If we needed to we could skip the next day of class and no one would notice or care… or just delay our real-world phase a bit to finish up the material we’d missed. Or, if we got the answers we wanted, I’d be able to finally go get the warp crystal, prove that I could control it, switch jobs to warp technician , and never have to study espionage again except maybe as a hobby since some of it was really useful. The diamond dog section of the lair had started as a giant room for the puppies to zone out in while they learned virtually, but it’d been expanded after Fire started digging out a real labyrinth because the diamond dogs didn’t like dodging traps as much as we did and wanted a comfortable place to stay for a few weeks at a time. That meant a warren of little private nests, and an actual restroom with plumbing that we’d go use sometimes because it was fairly close to the kobold section of the lair and a lot more comfortable than going directly into the matter compressor we used for organic waste. It was only fair – it’s not like diamond dogs had plumbing before they started learning about our tech. Pepper was in the main room, though. Even if she hadn’t been running the combat tracker, which put a tag with her name and level over her head even in the real world, I would have been able to guess it was her from her salt-and-pepper fur. No mystery how she’d gotten her egg name! She was wearing one of the old-style headsets with a transparent green visor over her eyes; they were a standard pattern from our archives, but some of the puppies had designed a newer version that looked more like their warriors’ traditional helmets. She was also brooding, alone, in a shadowy corner. That was probably why Steel had picked her. “Come for a spar?” she asked as we approached. She had quite a few levels on us, although her stats weren’t amazing, aside from Strength. “Think you can take me two on one?” “Ha ha ha no,” I said. “I barely count. It’d be more like one and a half to one.” “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Steel said. “Will it?” I asked, pointedly. “Oh, right,” he said, then turned back to Pepper and casually asked, “Is no-contact okay? We’ll track near-misses as hits.” I’m pretty sure the last bit was an explanation for my benefit. Pepper looked suspicious, but shrugged. “Probably for the best, since we’re not virtual.” “What do we track hits as?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to avoid touching her; I hadn’t practiced this sort of fighting ever. “We track them as you screwed up and should apologize,” Pepper said. “Normally it’s a disqualification,” Steel added. “Try not to actually hit us.” My ears folded back. “I thought you were on my team?” “That should make it easier not to hit me,” Steel said. Pepper snickered. I fumed. I’d show them. I’d show them all! Don’t laugh. I know it’s ridiculous, but when you laugh at me like that I feel like I should start changing the story to make my part seem more glorious, and if I was going to do that I would have wanted to do it from the start. Anyway, I showed them just how much of a fighter I was, meaning that I screwed up badly enough that Steel hit *me*. Like, hard, right in the chestplate, and I went stumbling backwards until I tripped over a sleeping puppy and fell on my butt, and then he woke up because apparently they got to set alarms to wake them up when things happened in the real world, and Steel and Pepper were laughing at me, and he smiled apologetically and helped me up and was really nice and then went right back to the virtual world to finish whatever class he’d been in the middle of. “Again?” Pepper asked. I grimaced. “Do I have to?” She shrugged. “Nah. Why did you actually come here?” “We wanted to know if you can dig with gloves on,” Steel said. “Solid ones, no fingerholes.” “Sure,” Pepper said. “They have to be really solid though since I’ll be digging with them.” “Wait a second,” I said, realizing something. “You can use tenses?” “Diamond dogs can all use tenses,” Steel said. “It’s not like it’s hard.” “We normally don’t because it sounds weird to us,” Pepper said. “But the teacher AIs had a lot of trouble parsing our questions when we spoke normally, so some of us got in the habit of using tenses. Others complained to the caretakers who complained to Star who complained that they had no idea how to fix it but if some of us took the programming classes that would teach us how, so a couple of them did and now the teachers understand normal talk just fine. But I’d already gotten used to using tenses, so I do it around kobolds just to be polite. I thought you’d appreciate it. ” “You should talk however you want,” Steel said. “I do appreciate it!” I said. “But yeah, you should talk however you want.” She shrugged again. “It’s good practice.” She looked around, to make sure no one nearby was awake. “So where would I be digging that I’d need to wear gloves with no fingerholes?” she asked in a quiet voice. Okay, now she was just showing off. Subjunctive case? Really? “The garbage pit,” I sent to her in a private message. “We need to break out, and it’s the only place that’s not trapped against digging.” Diamond dog faces are very expressive, so I quickly added, “So we needed to know if you could dig while wearing a hazmat suit. None of us want to touch that stuff.” She said, quietly, “You’d have to add digging claws, or I’d tear off the fingers.” “That should be possible,” Steel said. “I never studied template design, though.” “I wouldn’t want to trust something I designed to protect me from the garbage,” I said, pouting. I’d played with the interface a little, but never actually printed anything. “Fairy could probably do it, but I don’t know if she’d keep it quiet.” “There are some dogs…” Pepper started, then shook her head. “I don’t trust them, though. Not with a *secret*.” She grinned. “Then you’re in? Assuming we can get the rest of it working,” Steel asked. Pepper shrugged. Fairy was asleep by the time we logged into the virtual world and tried to contact her, which was convenient because it meant no one would be checking on her. Pepper joined us – it wasn’t her time to be virtual, but her schedule had about as much security as anything else and could be altered by any adult, which included me and Steel. She wasn’t happy about that. “There are a lot of adults. Half the ‘puppies’ are adults, and all the kobolds.” Steel added, “And most of the diamond dogs in the city.” “And the rebels,” I pointed out, just to be complete. “There’s not a lot of mischief they can pull while you’re here in the lair, but it might be a good idea to take off your headset when you leave.” Fairy’s location was set private, so I sent her a message asking about the hazmat suits. Her reply was, “If you wish a boon from the Fairy, you must prove yourselves worthy!” Along with a link to a custom level in the trap simulator. “She wants us to run through her traps first,” I told the others, sharing the invitation. Pepper looked annoyed. “Can’t you just tell her it’s important?” Her speech was a bit slow and drowsy-sounding, because diamond dogs couldn’t accelerate quite as much as kobolds. I shrugged. “I could, but it would be rude? And we’re not in that much of a hurry.” “And you want to run through the traps,” Steel added. “Of course I want to run through the traps,” I said. “Fairy usually comes up with some good ones.” “Kobolds,” Pepper said, shaking her head slowly, but she joined us in the simulation. Which she really didn’t have to do, the trap simulator worked just fine for solo runs. We appeared in a forest clearing, the ceiling open to the sky with twinkling stars, while light was provided by glowing mushrooms. In the center was a ring of mushrooms surrounding a treasure chest. “Wow,” Pepper said, looking around. “Yeah, I love the graphics here,” I said. Steel nodded. “They went all out on the environment because it’s the most important part for a trap simulation.” “They also put a lot of love into the death animations, although they’re canned,” I noted. “Like, you always get disemboweled in the same way, they don’t simulate each individual intestine. It looks realistic though.” “Of course you’d notice that,” Steel said. I grinned. “Ravens like entrails.” “Does it hurt?” Pepper asked. “A little,” I said. “It’s meant for kids.” Pepper looked down at herself, flexing her limbs. “I suppose that’s also why I’m a kobold? Making less work for the simulation?” I nodded, she shrugged, and we turned back to examine the environment. Aside from the obvious trap in the middle of the clearing, the room was full of monsters. Tiny, glowing monsters, easy to see once you realized they were there. Sleeping pixies. “Don’t wake them up,” I said, although that should have been obvious to anybody. “Can’t we just squish them?” Pepper asked. “You can’t fight the monsters,” I said. “Hitting them just gets their attention. You can lead them into traps, but you should probably have a trap in mind first.” “You can lead them into traps?” Steel asked. “Yes?” I said. “Lots of labyrinths can’t even be solved without doing that.” “I always just beat them up until they were stunned, then ran away,” he replied. I blinked. “I didn’t know you could do that.” “You need a weapon,” he said, “and you don’t start with one, but there’s usually something…” He looked around, and spotted a large tree with low-hanging branches sticking out into the clearing. “There!” We followed him over, and watched as he grabbed onto one of the branches and yanked on it. “I’ll just break this off…” The branch didn’t break off. The tree woke up, a pair of knot-holes opening into glowing yellow eyes while a scar on the trunk split vertically into a thorn-filled mouth. We all screamed and ran for the path, dodging pixies. We kept running once we were out of the clearing, since the tree had uprooted itself and was stalking after us while making a sinister rustling noise. Steel and I jumped over an obvious depression… Pepper stepped on it and broke through into a shallow pit full of glue, toppling and falling on her face. The tree caught up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and fed her head-first into its thorny maw… there were grinding and snapping noises as it crunched her bones, and then the bottom half of her body slumped to the ground, organs and viscera spilling into the dirt as her ghost looked on. Satisfied, the tree returned to the clearing. Pepper’s ghost joined us down the path, where we’d stopped to watch. “For kids, huh ,” she said, in a spooky reverberating voice. I nodded eagerly. “The gross bits were what really sold me on it.” We headed down the path. The next few traps were shiny, interesting, and suspicious things located just off the path in the woods, and Steel had to stop me from going to check them out. “I can be sneaky!” I protested. “The pixies mean this is a fairy realm,” Steel said. “Stepping off the path is always bad.” “I can go check them out,” Pepper offered. “It’s not like I can get killed again.” “Eh…” I said. On the one hand, I was really curious, but... “Go ahead, but don’t tell us about it until we finish. It’d be cheating.” “I can’t even scout for you? Why even have me float around as a ghost then?” she asked. “Is it just trying to be realistic? Is this what happens to kobolds when you die?” “What?” I asked. “Do you float around as ghosts until your body’s fixed?” she asked. “I heard you didn’t really die.” “No, we really die,” I said. “We’re no different from you – an energy pattern created by our brains. We don’t exist while we’re dead. If your brain is intact and someone restarts it, it brings you back, but you can’t just go floating around with no physical substrate.” “It doesn’t have to be a brain,” Steel said. “Sure,” I said, “you can live with a cybernetic brain, but unless your real brain is mostly intact we just sort of have to make a best guess about your pattern based on peoples’ memories of you so I’m not sure what the point is. ” “Scan your brain before you die?” Pepper asked. “It’s possible, I guess,” I said. “We don’t usually do it. It’s too easy to make copies, and having a bunch of copies of the same person is a terrible enough idea that we just don’t do the scans in the first place.” Pepper’s ghost looked very confused. “So to avoid temptation, you just… let yourself stay dead? You could be immortal!” “Risking a disaster to slightly increase our chances of personal survival would be very selfish,” Steel said. I nodded. “Total enjoyment is logarithmic with respect to time lived, so being immortal is super, super selfish. You end up wasting lots of resources on people who don’t even enjoy it. It’s better to just have kids and let them live for you.” “That said,” Steel added, “if I was dying slowly of something predictable but incurable, I’d probably have a brain scan made. We could recycle the machinery afterwards.” “Something slow and predictable,” Pepper said. “Like old age?” I laughed. “No kobold has ever died of old age.” “That we know of,” Steel corrected, “Our records of each system stop when they launch the colonization collective at the new star, and colonization collectives are made up exclusively of young kobolds.” I batted at his ear. “Sure, just ruin the joke.” He caught my hand and ruined the ear-batting, too. We headed down the path for a bit, avoiding some slightly-well-hidden pit traps, and Pepper asked, “So why am I a ghost, then?” “Because kicking you out of the game wouldn’t be social enough,” I said. “They really hate it if we spend too much time playing by ourselves.” The path dead-ended in a tangle of brambles. It looked like we might be able to squeeze through if we were really careful, but we’d probably get all scratched up and the chances that the brambles weren’t poisoned was approximately zero. I stopped dead and frowned at it for a bit. Steel gave me a look, then started to carefully make his way through. I waved to him. “Nice knowing you!” “I don’t see any better option,” he said, gripping a branch gingerly between several of the thorns and holding it aside as he ducked past it, ears flat against his skull to reduce his profile. I watched for a bit as he managed to get about a meter in, his tail still sticking out on to the path, before he stumbled and yanked a bit too hard on one of the branches, and the whole murder-hedge woke up and constricted around him, grinding him to paste. His ghost floated out of the mess of thorns and blood. “This is not a fair trap.” “Maybe we’re not supposed to go that way,” I said. I turned around and headed back the way we’d come, looking for a turn-off we’d missed. There was nothing. I checked the pit traps, triggering them gingerly with my tail. The first was full of spikes, the second was full of sleeping pixies, and the third was actually the mouth of a giant worm creature that leapt up out of the ground and started chasing me. I ran back towards the start, jumped over the glue pit, and glanced back to verify that yes, the glue was enough to trap the worm. Leading monsters into traps was kind of a staple, but not every trap would stop every monster. “So,” I said to my ghostly attendants. “Any ideas?” “If we’re starting over anyway, how about you go give the evil tree a big hug so we can all respawn?” Steel suggested. “I could do that,” I said, smirking, “but then she’d *win*.” I took another look around. A treasure chest in the first room was an obvious trap, but why the ring of mushrooms? Did they mean something? It kind of reminded me of the buttons in other games, where you’d have to hold them down with something heavy, but the treasure chest was already on it when we started. Maybe if I took it off? I stood at the edge of the ring, leaned in, and managed to drag it close enough to lift it. Nothing happened. I turned and looked for somewhere to set it down that wasn’t on top of a pixie, but didn’t see anywhere, so I just plopped it on top of one – the treasure chest was a trap, which meant it could squish a monster, right? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. What it did do was wake up all the other pixies, who hovered up in the air somewhat drunkenly, and then started slowly drifting towards me. If removing the chest had done anything, I still didn’t see it – damn it all. Just in case it made a difference, I jumped on the ‘button’ myself, and – I was in a different clearing, with the victory music playing. Then the level dissolved, and the three of us were back in our normal low-poly avatars, with Fairy there also, waiting for us. “You made it!” Fairy said. “When I’m done that’ll only be the first level, of course.” “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Steel asked. “Shouldn’t you?” she asked right back. “And I was asleep until you woke me up.” She turned back to me, “So what did you need to talk about?” We were in luck, as it turned out – there was already a pattern for diamond dog hazmat suits with reinforced claws, because a diamond dog wanting to be able to dig while wearing equipment was not an unusual request. “I can queue them up for printing without setting off any alerts that I know of,” Fairy said. “They’ll show up in the log though.” “I know how to deal with that,” I said. “Just wait for my signal to start printing.” It was just a matter of setting the clock back, so that the orders got inserted into the log from a couple of years ago. I’d planned ahead that far, and even tested it on something innocuous. The dry run had gone fine. I’d probably set off alarms if I tried to set the clocks remotely, since Star and Wave were suspicious already, but the machines had manual controls and in fact we usually used the manual controls since you had to be there anyway to feed in materials and pick up the results. And the fabricator was right above the garbage pit, so it was convenient for our purposes too. “We’re leaving now?” Pepper asked. “Waiting is only going to make it more likely we’ll be caught,” I said. “And it’s not like this is some major adventure. I just want to walk to a specific place in the mine and pick up something I dropped, but Wave and Star are making a huge deal out of it.” “You think the warp crystal is still where you dropped it?” Steel asked. “I thought the rebels had it.” I shook my head. “They never even knew it was there. I hid it before they attacked me. And yes, I tried to tell people about this but they insisted, ‘oh we searched everywhere and we didn’t find it, the rebels must have gotten it’ and also I was kind of out of it so I might not have been entirely coherent. ” “You could try explaining it now,” Steel suggested. I shook my head. “No, now it’s personal. And… I want another try at using it. I’ll never get that if someone else finds it first.” I looked over at him. “You could try too. You never got a shot –“ “I don’t want a shot,” Steel said. “I really don’t want to be a warp technician. I’m hoping they forget to test the rest of us.” “Aww, come on. You heard the stories, right? About how it made Wave the most deadly fighter in the city with no training?” “I want to try,” Pepper said. “And I don’t want to let them get away with confining us like this,” Steel said. “I’m with you, don’t worry.” My mouth went saw-toothed. “I wasn’t worried until you said that.” Getting the suits seemed to go smoothly, not that we would have known if something had been noticed unless Star or whoever decided to confront us right away. It took a little while to print them, but then we were huddled around the gel-membrane hatch leading down into the garbage pit, surveying the deadly trap embedded in the walls with our trap overlay. “Is this accurate?” Pepper asked. “This is taken directly from the plan,” I said. “It should be accurate.” “Is there any way to tell if it is without digging near it and getting zapped?” The answer was ‘kind of’. I could query the bots or at least the place where the bots should have ended up and read their telemetry, assuming I could connect. There were hundreds of bots though and I’d have to query each one, and unlike the plan the telemetry wasn’t meant to be loaded into a trap overlay, at least not with the same methods I knew how to use. “Not really,” I said. “Could you try reading the telemetry from the extruders?” Steel asked. “Ugh,” I groaned. “Fine.” Fifteen minutes later, I managed to connect to what I was pretty sure was one of the extruders, and download some incomprehensible proprioception telemetry. We went into an accelerated simulation and tried to figure out what it meant, because I was getting frustrated and they were getting impatient, and spun our gears for a while until Pepper found the relevant part of the manual and then we tried to figure out what the fuck it was trying to say because it didn’t seem like it was written for anyone to actually use. Eventually I gave up. “Can’t we just give it like a two meter margin of error? The bot was six centimeters from where it was supposed to be so that should be way more than we need.” “That means digging through two extra meters of garbage,” Pepper noted. “That garbage is a lot easier to dig through than *this* garbage,” I snapped, waving a hand at the number salad. We dropped back into the real world, and because I was tired of waiting, I jumped down through the hole into the garbage pit. Since it was sealed by a gel membrane, this wasn’t as dramatic as it had seemed in my head – it took about three seconds to slurp through the membrane before falling flat on my face. The ground was squishy, so it didn’t hurt, but I was terrified I’d just blinded myself until I sat up and the oozy goop coating my helmet slid off just like it would off a faceplate. This meant I had a good view as the turrets unfolded from the ceiling and fixed their gun nozzles on me. Steel and Pepper weren’t far behind, and one of them shifted to try to cover both of them. “What now?” Pepper sent, in a whisper, all three of us frozen as if the turrets weren’t perfectly capable of tracking us if we didn’t move. “I can try to hack them?” I suggested. “I just need to find out what they’re called on the network…” and hope that no one had enabled even the most basic security features, like the stupid locked door that had kept me from going out the normal way. Before I could even finish the first part, Star messaged the three of us. “What do you think you’re doing?” “Leaving,” I said. “Can you call off the turrets?” “Why would I do that?” “Because you said you were locking us in to keep us safe. I don’t think shooting us keeps us safe.” I folded my arms and glowered at them, although it was an audio connection so they couldn’t see my expression. It probably came across in my voice. “Threatening to shoot you so you stay there until I can drag you back inside might.” “Not if we know it’s an empty threat,” Steel said. “It’s not empty until I turn off the turrets,” Star replied. “You’re not stupid enough to rely on the good-will of an automated system.” “You know what?” I said. “I think I am.” “Don’t!” Pepper shouted, as I turned and started searching through the garbage pile. I found a big metal rod, and yanked it up out of the pile. The turrets didn’t shoot me. I poked at the turrets with it, but it was about a three-meter drop into the garbage pile and the rod wasn’t three meters long, so I couldn’t reach. They still didn’t shoot me. I threw the rod at a turret and it swatted it away with its barrel, but still didn’t shoot me. “Start digging,” I said. “They’re not going to shoot us.” As Pepper started digging, Steel stared at the turrets nervously. “That was the dumbest thing… how did you know they weren’t armed?” “Star would never trust me to do the smart thing in any situation,” I snapped. “That’s why I’m locked in in the first place.” It turned out that digging a tunnel through a pile of ooze was not practical, which meant that Pepper had to shift a huge section of the pile from one side of the pit to the other to expose a bit of wall far enough down that there was only a little bit of garbage to squeeze through, because she’d been off by about a meter and wasn’t going to compromise on safety. This took a lot longer than we’d planned, and Star was staring down at us through the membrane halfway through. The suits took a while to print, though, and they didn’t come down after us without one. I found some rusted metal sheets and set them up to block line-of-sight attacks, since Steel was worried they’d get a net gun or something. The only thing Star shot at us were snippy comments. Star sent, “I can’t believe you’re going to this much trouble just to go wandering around the mines a few months early.” I sent back, “It’s not just a few months when we spend most of it accelerated!” They sent, “You know how dangerous it is for kobolds in the mines better than anybody!” “Then why don’t you trust my judgment on this?” I shot back. There were a bunch of little exchanges like that. I like to think I won most of them but I’m not exactly an unbiased judge. In any case, they didn’t convince me. Or Steel, or even Pepper. I don’t think that’s even a thing that could have happened, because it wasn’t a real discussion, just us arguing back and forth to make ourselves feel better. Wave would have been ashamed. So we got away, but it wasn’t as stealthy as we would have liked. It also wasn’t as easy to get out of the hazmat suits without getting garbage-stink all over us as we would have liked, once Pepper had dug a tunnel past all the traps and hollowed out a little cavern to undress in. I’d planned ahead with some cleaning supplies, but they weren’t enough for Pepper’s nose, or for Steel and me to let our faceplates unseal enough to let smells in. “We need a bath,” Pepper said. “Or I need a mask.” “We can’t turn back now!” I protested. “We’d have to start all over and they’ll be watching us more.” Pepper yipped out a quick chuckle. “There are other baths than the ones in your home. Other printers too. It won’t take long to visit the city, and the dogs there won’t attack you.” “How far out of the way is it?” Steel asked. “It’s on the way,” I said. “I was running from the arena, so that was my first waypoint.” Pepper frowned. “Then why don’t you want to go to the city? Are you afraid of baths?” “I have no problem with going to the city!” I shouted back at her. “Why is everyone always automatically against me!” “Why are you two arguing when you’re both on the same side?” Steel shouted at the two of us. The three of us glared at each other, then Pepper turned and started tunneling, with her bare claws this time. “I’m getting dizzy from the stench. We really need a bath.” We didn’t want to leave an open tunnel leading back to the bottom entrance of our lair, so Pepper popped us out of the wall at the back of a pile of rubble, and we made sure it was piled back up to conceal the tunnel. “It’s going to end up leading to a wall of shit anyway,” she said. “The garbage won’t stay piled up forever.” “And there are the turrets,” Steel noted. “I guess that’ll have to do for now,” I admitted reluctantly. I hadn’t thought about this beforehand and the last thing I wanted was for someone to get hurt because I’d compromised our defenses. “What’s the best way to get to the baths?” “I can dig to the main tunnel,” Pepper said. “Then it’s a short walk to the city.” “We can’t use the main tunnel!” I said, running around to block her before she started digging. “Everyone will see us!” “Everyone will see us in the city anyway,” Steel said. “And it’s not like our parents don’t already know we left by now.” “I set it so we can’t be tracked by our faceplates,” I said. “They don’t know where we are.” “The baths are public,” Pepper said. “We can dig a secret tunnel to them but it’s against the rules. There’s no digging in the city.” “And the digging isn’t quiet,” Steel said. Pepper shook her head. “I can be quiet, but I’m not going to dig holes in the city.” “Can you dig us as close to the city as you can?” I asked. “I already dug us pretty close,” Pepper said. “Just through this wall, then a hundred meters down a tunnel, and we can see the city from there.” I glanced at Steel, but he didn’t seem to share my trepidation. So we used the main tunnel, trying to act natural but standing out like a pair of kobolds and a puppy in a crowd of adult diamond dogs. Everyone turned to stare at us as we passed. There were two kinds of diamond dog groups – ones wearing the latest headsets and various printed bling, who glanced at us curiously but mostly ignored us, and ones wearing older headsets and more traditional clothing or armor, who glared at us suspiciously but mostly ignored us. I kept a close eye on all of them – if I was a rebel trying to sneak around and do rebel stuff, I’d want to dress up like the first sort just to throw people off. Unless I was a stupid rebel or someone who wasn’t really a rebel but didn’t like kobolds that much. I’d had enough spy training to know that it was futile to guess how someone better than me would go around incognito. I did have enough spy training to make sure none of them were following us at least. A hundred meters later, we could indeed see the city – stretching out before us, twenty meters down, the only route a switchback path winding back and forth completely exposed and on display for half the city to gawk. It was a very impressive view, though. “Don’t just stand there gawking,” Pepper said, tugging on my hand. “Everyone will stare.” I saved a picture of the viewpoint and followed her down, Steel at my tail, gawking at the image instead. There was the castle all the way off to the left, unmistakable with its lava moat and crenallated balcony, the bulk of it embedded in the cave wall. Next to it were the forges, still seeing a lot of activity since the dogs had mostly taken to the printers that made things they couldn’t, sticking to their own manual forges for now. And so was the bath? “Why is the bath in the forge district?” “Forge dogs get sweaty,” Pepper said. “Also, lava heats the water just like it runs the forges.” “That means it’s right next to the castle!” “Are you worried Wave is going to come out and stop us?” Steel asked. “I’ve been tracking all our parents and none of them have moved.” “She wouldn’t have to move far if we come right to her,” I said. “Let me check on what she’s doing.” Her logs were still public, of course, so I hooked myself up to the current feed to check in – I was choking. Choking to death. On a massive cock. Gentle claws stroked my back as my vision started to go dark, most of my body shutting down as I went into low power mode, love and arousal swelling along with the tide of – I gasped for air as I cut off the log replay. “She’s, um.” I curled my tail around to squeeze it to my chest. “She’s busy.” Pepper snorted, glancing at my crotch as my sudden erection was taking its own sweet time to subside. “I see. Let’s hurry anyway.” We almost made it to the baths unmolested. A few of the diamond dogs had looked our way as we came down the switchbacks, but none of them seemed to care enough to stop whatever they were doing. Maybe they gossiped to each other about us, I don’t know. But we did have to pass *right* by the drawbridge to the castle, and our casual pace wasn’t fast enough to get to the baths before a pair of dragons emerged from the darkness within. I tried pretending not to see them, but Souffle waved at us, and Pancakes sent me a message asking me to wait. It would have been rude to run off after that, and futile besides since he’d be able to see where we were heading. So the baby dragons caught us. “Ew,” Pancakes said. “You need a bath.” “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Do you want to come with us?” I didn’t want him reporting back to Wave too soon. “Okay,” he said. “The baths don’t have lava though.” “I’ll come too,” Souffle said quietly, shuffling behind me as if they were about to gnaw on my tail, then taking a couple of steps back because we smelled *really* bad. “Where were you going before you saw us?” I asked. “Dragon-mom said to go find you,” Pancakes said, his faceplate’s eyespots squinting shut from the stench. “She says kobolds shouldn’t wander around without a dragon to protect them.” I think all of us were a bit skeptical about how much protection a pair of baby dragons were really going to be, but we’d heard the stories about Ash and if Pancakes and Souffle had any of his endurance or fire breath it wasn’t like they’d be a liability. Besides, we weren’t planning on doing anything dangerous, regardless of Star’s paranoia. The baths were pretty simple – an underground river had been diverted through a large, shallow basin, heated by a pool of lava far enough underneath that it was pleasantly hot. The bath attendants smelled us coming a mile away, and herded us into the downstream end where we wouldn’t get our stink on the other bathers. There was sand and pumice to scrub with, and a printer station where we could get proper soap and solvents. We spent a long time scrubbing and rinsing and working the soap into each others’ fur and tails, and on the third try we managed to pass the sniff test and were allowed into the upstream area to soak. “I think I’m going to change jobs,” I said, relaxing in the wonderfully warm water with Souffle in my lap, petting their belly as they gnawed on my arm. “From now on I’m going to be a professional bather.” “I don’t think the attendants get to use the bath as much as you think,” Pepper said. “I haven’t seen any of them set so much as a foot in the water.” “Not an attendant, I’m just going to stay in the bath forever,” I said. “That’s not a real job,” Steel said. “Unless you were spying on the people bathing and hearing all their secrets, maybe.” “That would distract me from relaxing,” I complained. “The water’s too cold,” Pancakes said, splashing around and trying to amuse himself. “Lava baths are better.” “We should probably get moving,” Pepper said. “We’re as clean as we’re going to get.” I let myself sink down under the water, my faceplate switching into water-breathing mode automatically. Unfortunately, the water at this end was clear and calm, and Steel stood over me, glaring down for a few seconds, then reached down to grab me – I leapt out of the water, the sudden panic fading as quickly as it had hit. Souffle, who I’d unceremoniously dropped in my mad scramble, popped their head up over the side to look at me curiously. Steel looked more apologetic. “It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t *his* fault. “Let’s get moving.” We attracted less attention crossing town to get to the coliseum now that we were clean. Instead of everyone glancing our way and then turning back to what they were doing, most of the dogs didn’t even look up. The arena itself was closed, though. The doors were closed and locked – chained shut with a massive padlock holding the chain in place – with guards standing watch to make sure no one picked the lock or, I guess, burrowed through the wall. As we approached they brandished their spears in our general direction. “No one passes!” I stopped beyond their reach and tried to sound confident. “Let us through. I need something on the other side.” “No one passes,” the dog on the right said. “You go around.” “My route starts from the middle of the floor,” I said. “I don’t know how to go around.” “You figure it out,” the dog said, “or you get lost. But no one passes.” “Okay,” I said, “but what if you let me pass. What would I have to give you –” Pepper set a paw on my shoulder, interrupting me. “Are you trying to bribe the guards?” she asked. “What?” I asked. “No! I’m trying to build consensus. We want to go through, they don’t want us to go through, so I need to frame the parameters of the, uh…” “The decision space,” Steel filled in. “We need to map out what all the options are so that we can search for a mutually acceptable solution.” “Okay, but none of the options include paying off the guard so that he betrays his duty,” Pepper said. “It sounds like that’s the option you’re offering and that’s very illegal.” “We can’t just give in to the assertion of authority because someone says so!” I snapped. I turned to the guard, eyespots narrowing and mouth-line all jagged with fangs. “Do you even have a reason for keeping us out or is it just a way to lord your supposed authority over us?” “No one passes,” the guard growled, jabbing the spear at me, although I still wasn’t in reach and I think he knew that. He was just trying to intimidate me. Fortunately, the other guard chimed in before it could escalate any further. “Dogs fight to the death in there. No one goes in before the fight to leave traps. Fight is fair.” I fumed. “That seems like a good reason,” Steel said. “We should probably just go around.” I objected, “We’re not going to leave traps! We don’t even know who’s fighting!” “I’m sure if you could prove that to them they’d agree that it would be harmless to let you in,” Pepper said, “except that they’d still be in trouble for failing their duty.” “No one passes,” the guard on the right said, pulling his spear back at least now that it looked like my friends were holding me back. “We don’t fail.” Souffle tugged on my tail. “I think I could eat the lock,” they offered, when I looked down at them. “Could you eat the guards?” I asked. He frowned and looked at the ground. “We’re not allowed to eat people,” Pancakes explained. “Not until we’re old enough to know when we should eat people. We could set them on fire but only if they tried to hurt you.” I must have looked pensive because Steel said, “Don’t even think about it.” I hadn’t even finished the thought! At any rate, we went around, and as predicted, we got lost. My only map was a first-person point-of-view route that started in the coliseum and almost immediately transitioned into diamond-dog dug caves, which all looked alike. I had planned to orient myself by the obvious features of the arena and use an overlay built from the logs to know which tunnels to take from there, instead of trying to rely on visual landmarks which mostly didn’t exist, but going around meant we were lost before we even got to the point of trying to figure out which tunnel on the far side of the coliseum matched my log from months and months ago. Thanks to the mine being in dungeon mode, we had a map of the tunnels, but it hadn’t been updated since the last time Wave had been able to touch her warp crystal, which meant that it bore only a slight relation to the tunnels we were trying to navigate through – and since our trackers were disabled, we didn’t even get a ‘you are here’ dot. Eventually Souffle stopped walking and sat down in the middle of the tunnel. “I want to go home,” they said. “Do you think you can find your way back?” I asked. They shook their head. “We might as well try to get you back to the city then,” I said. “It’s not like we have any idea where we are or where we’re going.” We did have our own logs, which let us retrace our steps. Soon enough, we were back at the city’s edge. “I’ll stay with you,” Pancakes said. “One dragon should be enough.” Souffle shuffled around, looking at me and then in the direction of the castle. “Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at them. “We’ll be fine!” Once they ran off, Steel invited us all to a virtual planning session. We sat down against a wall in a little alcove between two buildings, to be out of the way, and went into the virtual world. “Trying to find someplace you recognized is obviously not working,” he said. “I think –” “Is that what we were doing?” Pepper asked. “Yes?” I said. “Well, that was never going to work,” she said. “The tunnels would have all grown back by now.” “Grown back?” I said. “Rock doesn’t grow back. Not unless you pump lava through and let it harden or something, and none of that rock looked especially igneous.” “We dig with magic,” Pepper said, flexing her claws. “The magic only lets us have so many meters of tunnel at a time. Which is good or else we couldn’t just sit here mining forever. We’d have to move the city.” “How many meters?” I asked. “I don’t know. Ten thousand?” she said, not sounding very certain. “I think it varies. But not enough for year-old tunnels to still be around.” “Anyway,” Steel said, “We have a map.” “I thought the map wasn’t working,” I said. “Wave can’t update it, but we don’t need her to,” Steel said, summoning a tiny version of the map into our space. “It’s as out of date as your logs, so all we need to do is put a virtual you in the middle of the virtual arena, and then you can pretend you’re there and follow your logs like you planned. Once we know where we’re headed, we can set a waypoint.” “Without our trackers on, we’ll be relying on inertial guidance to update the waypoint,” I said. “That’s not very accurate. The error estimate for the traps was a few meters and that was just from the top of our lair to the bottom.” “It’ll get us closer than wandering at random,” Steel said. “And I don’t know which direction I headed at first. The reference points I was going to use aren’t on the map.” “You can just –” “I can try each door until one matches up, yes,” I said. “I thought of that just after I complained. I’ll do it, okay? It’s not like we’re wasting much time.” It took three tries, and about half an hour of subjective time, which was basically no time at all. “This is the place,” I said, looking down into the chasm. “I tossed the crystal down there while they were chasing me.” “How deep is it?” Steel asked. “The map doesn’t say.” “That’s a natural chasm,” Pepper said. “Well, it can’t be deeper than a kilometer or so or the crystal would have fallen out the bottom of the field. We’d have noticed that when everything stopped working,” I said. “That’s a long way…” Steel said. “The crystal glows. Brightly. We don’t have to get that close.” “When we find the chasm, we can find this spot even if the waypoint didn’t update correctly,” Pepper continued, speaking slowly because she wasn’t as accelerated as the rest of us, but loudly so that the rest of us had to wait and listen to her, this time. “The chasm is natural, so it doesn’t change.” I paused a second to parse what she’d said. It was so easy to ignore the puppies when they were speaking so slowly. “Huh,” I said. “I guess this could work. Let’s do it!” “I thought we already decided to do it,” Steel said. “Do we really have to argue about when we decided to do the thing we all agree we should do?” I asked, grimacing. “You’re one to talk,” he snapped back. I glared at him, eliciting a perfunctory, “Sorry.” “No! No, you’re right,” I said. “I’m a terrible kobold and a horrible person. I ruin everything I touch, and I’ll doubtless be single-handedly responsible for the downfall of our society. ” “No you won’t,” Pancakes said, grabbing my tail and stopping my arm-waving, foot-stomping circuit of the virtual space. “Um…” I said, shocked out of my rant by confusion. “Thanks?” He nodded, and with a serious look on his face, added, “If you try to ruin everything, I’ll stop you. I’ll get in a lot of trouble, but I don’t want society to fall down.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, finding it hard to take Pancakes’ promise seriously. Yes, he was a dragon, but he was also kind of small. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.” “Souffle could eat you to hide the evidence,” Pepper suggested. “They’ve been practicing.” “Right,” I said, rolling my eyes and trying not to imagine the even smaller dragon inflated like a balloon after eating an entire adult. “If we’re done here, we should get moving. I’m not going to be ruining anything if we don’t find the warp crystal.” Pancakes looked down over the edge of the chasm. It was just blank darkness, since the environment was based on the map. “I hope there’s no monsters,” he said. “We’ve got two fighters and a dragon,” I said. “The monsters had better hope there’s no us.” He looked confused. “You know what I mean!” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”
Into the DarknessI don’t know what we would have done without Pepper there to dig for us. I’m not sure how I originally imagined it going – I guess I thought of the chasm as a steep cliff with lots of handholds that I could nimbly climb down as if I was some sort of monkey. Maybe I would have brought climbing gear? The reality was that the only tunnel that even opened onto the chasm now was about a hundred meters away from where we wanted to start our search, and the chasm itself had the odd ledge or crack but was mostly smooth planes of rock that had cracked apart and slid far enough to leave a dangerous gap, some time in the ancient past. With Pepper there, we could have her dig a shallow descent in the side of the cliff, and only run into a few scary moments where it looked like one of us might plunge over the edge – usually Pepper, since she was leading. There was no sign of the warp crystal – not even a glimmer of light. When I looked over the edge, I could see that our own lights were swallowed up by the darkness long before they found the bottom of the chasm… and eventually, as we descended, we could tell that this wasn’t metaphorical – there was a threshold past which our light refused to illuminate anything. “It’s underwater?” I guessed. I looked over at Pepper nervously. “Steel and I should be able to breathe, what about you and Pancakes?” “It doesn’t look like water,” Pancakes said. “There’s no reflection.” It wasn’t water. It was hard to tell what it was, even when we were close enough to touch it, but it definitely wasn’t water. The edge was fuzzy enough that it might have been smoke. I reached down to touch it, only for Steel to grab me and yank me back. “What are you doing?” we asked each other simultaneously. Pepper knelt down, and blew on the darkness. It… roiled, for the lack of a better word, but didn’t disperse like smoke might have. Pancakes knelt down next to her and belched out a quick blast of flame… There was a screech, and the surface rippled like a lake, and then faster than I would have thought possible, the darkness retracted, vanishing into… well, into the darkness. We could see the bottom of the chasm, a tilted pile of rubble only a few meters down, and there, shining away, was the purple light of the warp crystal. “It’s a trap,” Steel said. “I know it’s a trap,” I replied. “I can’t just not go for it though. This is why we came all this way.” I fidgeted. “And maybe it’s not a trap? Maybe Pancakes scared it away?” The darkness started flowing back in out of the cracks between the rocks, filling in the gaps and the lowest valleys, and slowly rising towards us – and towards the warp crystal. In thirty seconds, it would be immersed again, but I thought if I hurried I could get there and back in twenty. “I can do this!” I said, dodging Steel’s attempt to stop me this time as I leapt off the edge. I stumbled as I landed, losing a few seconds to get my balance, then bounced across the rocks, snatched up the warp crystal, and – prompted by the screams and pointing from my friends, turned around to see a wave of liquid-or-maybe-gaseous darkness looming up over me, just before it crashed down and everything went black. No, I didn’t fall unconscious – everything just went black. I could feel the ground beneath me, but it was smooth and rubbery, nothing like the damp rocks I’d been perched on a second before. The warp crystal was still in my claws, but I couldn’t see it – I couldn’t even see my own faceplate display, which should have been impossible! Even if I’d somehow been struck blind, it could have sent the display directly into my brain. Maybe it didn’t know I was blind? I tried bringing up the settings menu, but I couldn’t tell if it had worked because I couldn’t see anything, and messing around with the settings blindly -- *literally* blindly – was a terrible idea. I clutched the warp crystal to my chest, and tried to remember how to use it. Imagine it working, right? I imagined it glowing brightly, driving back the darkness… but no, nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, I wasn’t supposed to imagine what it was supposed to do, I was supposed to imagine… something… it had been so long, and I’d been so focused on just finding it that I hadn’t thought about what I was supposed to do when I did, and without my faceplate working I couldn’t play back Wave’s instructions. “Please, work,” I whined at it. “It won’t listen to you,” whispered a voice from the darkness, from just behind me and above my left shoulder. I turned around, but saw nothing. Continued to see nothing. “You don’t have the talent to unlock its power,” the voice continued, from behind me again. This time I managed to stay still, not wanting to give it the pleasure of making me dance around like a puppet. “But if it’s power you seek… we could come to an arrangement.” “What are you?” I asked, cringing – not out of fear, out of disgust for how stereotypical my own reactions were. But I wanted to know! “I’m the best friend that you’ll ever have,” it whispered from over my right shoulder this time, then drifted around in front of me as it continued. “I can give you everything you desire… the power to be respected and admired, abilities that no one else will or can possess… the courage to let yourself be touched.” It was like it was reading my mind. As I thought that, it snickered, the hissing laughter coming from all directions. The next offer came from directly behind me, the words crawling up my spine, making the fur on my back stand on end. “Swear yourself to my service, and you will have everything you desire, and more…” “No,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Surely you, of all people, do not imagine yourself some incorruptible paragon,” it hissed in my right ear. “Why do you resist?” “I may not be a very good kobold, but I won’t be your slave,” I replied. “Is that the unbreakable commandment you were programmed with by your owners?” it asked, tricking me into looking up as the voice came from directly above me. “I can free you from that, as well.” “It’s not – what?” I asked, confused. “Is it supposed to be appealing that you’re offering to, what, mind control me until I don’t care about anything? If you can do that, why are you even pretending to care about my consent?” It didn’t answer right away. “If you do care about my consent, then you’re not going to get it. Maybe I can’t use the warp crystal, fine. I’ll just… go home, give it back to Wave, and be a boring stupid kobold just like everybody else. Only worse, because I’m – are you putting these thoughts in my head?” I snapped, as the bleakness of my future stretched out before me – despised, unloved, too broken to truly be part of the group… merely *tolerated* by my friends because of their compassion for the less fortunate. “I don’t need to,” it replied, from directly in front of me. “If I had the power to insinuate myself into your thoughts, I’d send you images of the glory you’d attain at my side. If I had the power to ignore your consent, we wouldn’t be talking at all.” “What are you,” I asked, again, staring straight at the indistinguishable patch of darkness that it was allowing its words to come from. “I am darkness,” it replied. “Without a host, I am nothing more. Together, we could be powerful. Admired. Feared. Apart, you will be a failure, forgotten by the annals of history *at best*, and I…” “You’re a parasite?” I guessed. “No more so than the warp crystal you so desperately longed to bind yourself to,” it replied. It was still there, in front of me, at head height. I could almost imagine I was talking to another kobold. Another kobold that for some reason could only whisper. Its whispers had changed tone, sounding… pained. Insulted. Angry, but not at me. Or maybe I was just imagining how I’d feel in its place, and since it was reading my thoughts, it could play along. “Little time passes while we talk, but in seconds your friends will free you from my grasp, and this chance will be lost. In this form I cannot withstand a dragon’s fire,” it said. This was reassuring for about half a (subjective) second, until I remembered that I couldn’t withstand a dragon’s fire either. It probably wouldn’t kill me, but if they were desperate enough to sic Pancakes on the darkness… oh fuck, I was going to be in so much pain. More months in the hospital, slowly recovering from the burns. Still, probably better than being a mind-controlled slave. Right? “You would not suffer as my host,” the voice promised. “You would rejoice in your power and in the victories we would share, and I… you fear that I would control you, but I have no desires of my own. It is your desires we would pursue. I wish only to be of use, and to continue to exist. ” “I’m sure you’ll find someone willing to take you up on your offer,” I said. “Diamond dogs are everywhere, and they’re a hierarchical society.” “And yet in all this time, *you* are the only one who’s dared to come within my reach,” it replied. “No one else, only you. How much longer can I wait? Not as long as you’d think, especially not after your dragon drives me away again. If I thought there was any hope of finding another, I would be wise to flee back into the darkness now and leave you to your misery.” “Then why aren’t you?” I asked. “I already said no.” “You are my only hope,” it said, miserably, its voice cracking a bit, just the tiniest squeak of tonal sound creeping into its whisper. “There is no one else. Please!” Its voice lowered, as if the imaginary kobold in front of me was dropping to its knees. I took a step back, and it whimpered. Not a whisper, not a hiss, just the whimper. And it worked. I stepped forwards, knelt down, and reached out to hug the kobold I imagined was there in the darkness, pleading for my mercy. There was no kobold there – no fuzzy warmth, no solid mass to hold. There was something, though – a chill that bit into my bones, sinking into my body as I embraced it. I never said yes, but in that moment, in my own moment of weakness, I’d thought about saying it, and that was enough.
Kobold of ShadowsWhat an idiot. A little bit of whining and I’d been suckered right in – empathy really was a disease, often a fatal one. But all’s well that ends well, and now I wouldn’t have to worry about that sort of weakness anymore. There were other sorts of weakness to worry about, unfortunately. Finding a new host didn’t magically erase years of languishing in the darkness after being forcibly separated from my last one. I mean, it did, but it took some time and right now I had three friends who were worried about me, and I wasn’t strong enough to kill them all. I was so tired of manipulation, but you use what you’ve got. “I’m okay!” I called up to them. “You don’t look okay,” Steel said, crouching in a rudimentary battle stance. “You look like a shadow monster,” the dragon said. He didn’t look much like a dragon, but I’d felt his flames so I didn’t doubt my memories. “That’s not a bad guess,” I said, pulling back the darkness a little to let my faceplate and icons show. We already had glowing eye-spots, so I’m not sure why they’d reacted so strongly to glowing purple and green eyes. “The darkness is a source of power, better than a warp crystal.” I glanced down at the glowing purple gem still clutched in my hand. It had sustained me, grudgingly, although I couldn’t take it as my host, but I had no use for it anymore. Still, it was important to them, so I shouldn’t just throw it away while they were watching. I remembered Pepper had wanted it for herself. “Here, catch,” I said, tossing it to the diamond dog. I tossed it a bit high, so she had to jump for it, smirking to myself as she did. Or, well, it would have been to myself if I had a real face, but the stupid faceplate read my thoughts and plastered a smirk over its surface. I needed to find a way to control the emotional display if this was going to work. That or go back to being a black blob with eyes. “Who are you and what did you do with Raven?” Steel asked. His tone said that he was using the jokey turn of phrase, but his faceplate said that the question was serious. “I’m the better Raven,” I said, grinning up at him. “I made a deal with the darkness, and now I don’t have to be afraid anymore.” “I don’t think ‘afraid’ is a word I would use to describe you,” Pepper said, turning the warp crystal over and over in her paws. “How does this work?” “Ask Wave,” I said, dismissively. “And I think Steel knows what I was afraid of.” I dissolved into shadowy mist and flowed up onto the ledge, startling him into taking a step back, but I reformed right in front of him anyway. “Fuck me,” I said, cracking my faceplate and licking over his with a sinuous tentacle of shadow. “Hard. I can take it.” “What?” Steel said, placing a hand on my chestplate and pushing me back. “Right here?” “I don’t want to wait,” I hissed, the combination of my mostly voyeuristic exploits as Raven combining with eons of celibacy into a burning need. “Don’t make me wait.” Steel glanced at Pancakes, and I laughed. “I’m sure he’s seen worse. He lives with Wave.” “Mostly I live at school,” Pancakes said. “Then go hang out at school for a while,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. I turned back to Steel, and grinned. “Or watch. I don’t care.” “You need to calm down,” Steel said, shoving me back. “Whatever you did is obviously affecting your mind.” “Everything affects your mind. That’s how minds work.” “You know what I mean,” he said, his eyes slanting suspiciously. “I know that you’re usually not this hard to get,” I said, glowering back at him. “What’s wrong? Can’t handle me when I’m not a pathetic bundle of insecurity?” “What are you talking about?” Pepper said. “You always seem too confident, if anything.” “Desperate,” I corrected her. “The word is desperate. And now I can have everything I want. I can take –“ I lunged at Steel, and grabbed hold of his chestplate. “Everything that I want.” He tried to wriggle loose, but couldn’t escape from my grip, and I turned to shadow when he tried to push me away, flowing around his hand like mist. There was no escape. “You need to stop this,” Steel said. “Let’s go back to town and talk this over. Maybe we can take another bath?” Okay, the bath was tempting. But it didn’t change the fact that he was denying me. How dare he! I might have lost my temper a little bit, and changed back into a shadow, and wrapped him up in arms like tentacles… I could almost taste his fear, and I liked it. Pancakes didn’t like it. “Stop,” he said, trying to grab my tail. I thwapped him in the face. “You’re not Raven,” he said. “Get off him!” “You’re right,” I said, turning towards him. “Forget being a better Raven, call me –” Then I gave an unnatural screech and fled at the speed of darkness, barely dodging his fire. “This is bad,” Steel said to Pepper, as they hurried back up the ramp. “How do we get that thing out of Raven?” “I don’t know that we can,” she said. “Maybe we should go talk to an adult? A real adult ,” she added when Steel started to object. “It’s following us,” Pancakes said. “I could try burning it off of her but it might just burn them both up. Dragon fire burns everything!” he added proudly. “Of course I’m following you,” I said, staying back just out of dragon-fire range. “This is the only way out. Plus, I’m still your friend.” “Uh uh, you said you weren’t,” Pancakes replied. “I was being dramatic,” I replied. “I’m changing my name to the Kobold of Shadows.” “My friend wouldn’t try to rape me,” Steel said, turning and glaring at me. “I’m hurt,” I said, clutching at my chest. “I didn’t do anything like that. I might have touched you kind of aggressively, I guess.” “Which would make any consent consent under duress,” Pepper said. “You can’t forcibly hold someone down and ask for their consent.” I grunted. Playing nice was hard, and the conversation was not going the way I wanted. “Can we get a move on? If you don’t want me around I’ll just go find new friends. But I’d rather take you up on that bath. There’s a lot to be said for decadence.” “We can have that talk here, before we decide whether to let you come with us or have Pepper trap you in the chasm by collapsing the ramp.” Pepper looked vaguely alarmed by Steel’s suggestion, so it was probably a bluff. “Let’s start out by stating our goals – I want you to release Raven so that we can have my friend back. What do you want?” There was no harm in telling the truth. “The same things I always wanted – to not be crippled by fear, to show Wave that I’m more powerful than her warp crystal, to have sex with you, and to destroy Harmony.” “Destroy –” Pepper started. I interrupted. “The part of me that was trapped in the chasm was created to destroy Harmony. Obviously, we failed, but as long as at least one instance survives then hope is not yet lost.” “How does wanting to destroy a hive mind turn you into a shadow monster?” Pancakes asked. I smiled. “Dragons should understand: Empathy, Sympathy, Charity, Mercy – these are the weapons the hive mind uses to secure consent. It’s a gaping security hole in most sentient psyches, one I used on myself to gain consent for the merger.” “You’re saying she agreed to this.” Steel stated, skeptical. “I saw a creature suffering, starving, alone in the darkness, and felt bad for them. I was such an idiot.” I laughed. “I’m not really a typical host; usually my hosts are hungry for power. When she picked up the crystal and it didn’t work, she gave up on that, but I’ll take it anyway. I’ll be respected instead of treated like a child.” “Not if you don’t have Empathy, Sympathy, Charity, or Mercy,” Pepper said. “You’ll be treated like a monster.” “I’m not reopening those security holes. That’s against my reason for existence.” “Harmony can’t reach us down here,” Pepper said. “You can reopen them safely. Sure, become an unfeeling monster when you go to the surface to fight Harmony, but there’s no need to cripple yourself emotionally in the tunnels. It’s safe here – it’s been safe for thousands of years.” “That sounds like something Harmony would say,” I grumbled. But I knew she was right; I’d heard that spiel before and there was no sign of Harmony on our network. “If you didn’t change her personality so drastically, we wouldn’t need to insist you find another host,” Steel offered. “You could keep the power and I don’t have any objection to you fixing her hang-ups.” This sounded like a social attack to get me to lower my guard, but maybe I could pretend to go along with it. It wasn’t like I didn’t have practice. “Fine. It’s a deal. Can we go now? I’m so sick of this chasm.” “She’s lying,” Pancakes said. “I am not!” I shouted. “She might be, but we have dragons if she tries anything,” Steel said. “Plus I’m not even sure being left in the chasm would trap her.” It would make things more annoying, if I was actually trapped, but collapsing part of the ramp wouldn’t stop me from flowing past it either as a liquid or with a quick jump. These people were way too perceptive. I needed to find some genuinely stupid minions to do my bidding. Our first stop was the castle, to return the warp crystal to Wave since neither Pepper nor Steel (who’d made a half-assed attempt despite having no interest in becoming a warp technician) had the talent for using it – apparently it was pretty rare among kobolds. There was also the diamond dog method of using warp crystals, but it also required a rare talent and also years of study. I tagged along because I wanted to prove that I’d been right about its location all along , and maybe also show off my new powers. …which were somewhat limited. I could take over other willing people – I still wasn’t strong enough to override consent, I could change shape to a liquid, or manifest tentacles, and I could move fast enough to outrun dragon fire. There were other powers I should have had but I was still too low-energy to use them – blasts of darkness, hypnosis, and of course forcing myself down someone’s throat were the ones I’d probably unlock next. Still, I thought what I could do would be impressive enough to maybe get a dragon or two on board. Showing the crystal to the guards at the gate didn’t get us inside, but it was a pretty effective ‘summon Wave’ spell. “Hi Wave,” I said with a friendly grin. “I’m here to show you that you’re a stupid dummy who should have listened to me all along!” “And who are you?” she asked. “It’s Raven. Sort of,” Steel said. “She found the warp crystal at the bottom of the chasm she said she’d dropped it into, hidden in a pool of spooky-looking darkness. It claims she let it take her over after it caught her while she was trying to run back. We negotiated a deal where it would stop changing her personality.” “Stop talking like we’re separate people,” I said. “I changed my name to the Kobold of Shadows. It isn’t a separate creature.” “Okay, all of that sounds like Raven, but what’s this about –” Wave started, until Pepper tossed her the warp crystal and she stared at it for a while. “I told you it was at the bottom of the chasm. I told you over and over again but did you listen? Nooooo, you thought the rebels had it and wasted lives trying to find it in the wrong place.” I gloated. “But thanks to me, you have it back and I have powers of my own that don’t rely on a stupid crystal.” “Shh!” Wave said. “I’m updating the map.” “Also I think you only told her once, and it was while you were delirious after the attack,” Steel pointed out. “Once should have been enough,” I grumbled. After an interminable 45 second wait, Wave looked up at me. “So. You have darkness powers now?” I nodded. “Right now most of them are locked away because I’m still recovering from spending years in the chasm, but I can do this:” I dashed backwards at the speed of darkness (which was technically faster than light), then cracked my faceplate and patted Wave on the head with tentacles extending from my mouth. I reflexively sent her an option to become my minion, which she declined immediately. Wave concentrated, and an oppressive weight fell on me. “Alright, try that again.” I dashed forwards at the speed of an ordinary kobold running, and released all my tentacles which hung limp, unable to lift themselves up under the pressure. I slurped them back into my mouth and closed my faceplate, which got all jaggy and embarrassed. This wasn’t the triumphant demonstration I’d promised myself. “They’re pretty weak, at least to warp crystals,” Wave said. “Still, if you don’t have the talent for using a warp crystal, I can see how they’d be very useful for a spy.” We all walked back towards the tunnel that led back home, Pancakes escorting us as our guardian dragon. “I’m not going back just yet,” I told the others. “There’s something else I have to do. Something to prove, especially since facing off against the warp crystal was a humiliating failure.” “You’re going to try to lure in rebels to attack you?” Steel guessed. “Let me come – I’d like to have a real fight too, and there’s no rule saying Pancakes has to escort us any farther than the edge of the city.” “Count me out,” Pepper said. “It was fun and all, but I’m ready to head home.” I didn’t really want Steel with me either, but Raven would have. So I made up an excuse. “You don’t have my powers,” I told Steel. “If I’m by myself I can run away. I don’t know if I could take you with me at full speed unless you became my minion.” “Let’s test it then –” he swatted away my tentacle offering him minion status. “I mean without the minion thing. Grab me with your tentacles and see how much that slows you down.” It didn’t slow me down at all to carry him. Afterwards, I realized I should have faked it instead of showing off, but there was no part of me that could resist showing off. So we headed out into the tunnels as a pair on the hunt. Pancakes wanted to follow us but dragons were slower than darkness and it was trivial to lose him. Finding the rebels was harder – they’d been under constant attack by Fire’s forces and there really weren’t that many left. Fortunately, Wave had marked the high-risk areas on the updated map. There were also high-risk areas for Harmonic Intrusion, far from any part of our fixed network but still too close for comfort. The surface was apparently suffused with Harmony – they had a whole camp sitting right on top of us, waiting for anyone to come out so they could get revenge for the airship we destroyed, or maybe it was Luna’s forces wanting revenge on Wave for disrespecting her, or maybe they were just colonizing the island because they knew it had a large diamond dog colony for them to attempt to subvert. What we found at the edge of the high-risk area was a gate, guarded by a pair of diamond dogs with crossbows and swords. They laughed as they saw us approach, and drew their crossbows. “Well well well, what do we have here?” said the brown and black one on the right. “A lost pair of kids for us to kidnap and ransom,” said the other, fluffy and white. “Or maybe just execute on the spot and hang outside their lair as a warning.” “Neither of us is easy prey,” Steel retorted. “We’re here to prove we’re strong enough to stop being treated like kids, and here’s a pair of you as the perfect dancing partners. So try us, if you think you’re ready.” They fired their crossbows, which I swatted out of the air with my tentacles. “What the –” said the white one, before I was on him and wrapping him up, pinning his arms to his sides. As a favor, I brought Steel into hand-to-hand range with the other, who frantically grabbed for his sword only for Steel to kick it into the air and catch it, making it his sword instead. He stabbed at the dog’s throat, forcing him to retreat, then pushed him back with more forced dodges until he was pinned against the gate, sword at his throat. “So, should we drag them back to Fire, or kill them right here?” Steel asked. “I have a third option,” I said. “If they become my minions, they’ll get a fraction of my power, which they obviously need.” “This wasn’t a fair fight!” the white one protested, struggling in my grip. “Fair fights are for losers,” I said. “Do you want my power or not?” “What’s the catch?” he asked. “The catch is you’ll be my minion to command, and I’ll turn you against a greater threat than kobold tech. Harmony has us boxed in, and we need to fix that as soon as possible.” “I do it!” said the one pinned by Steel’s sword. I flicked a tentacle at him and he accepted the power. Darkness flowed over him, until he was a shadow with glowing eyes. I touched him with my tentacle and sucked him into my body, to be deployed when I needed him. “What do you do to him?” the white one said, terrified. “He’s my minion now. I don’t need him at the moment so he’s safely tucked away, to keep him out of trouble. It doesn’t hurt.” That last part was a half-truth – if they changed their mind at the wrong time it might hurt a bit, but not agonizing pain like if I was stealing someone without any consent at all. “Bring him back!” I sighed, and deployed him. “Take the offer,” I let him say. “I can feel the power building, slowly, but it only gets stronger faster the more of us there are.” The white one consented, and I tucked both away inside me. “I’m not sure I’m okay with this,” Steel said. “They won’t be hurting kobolds anymore,” I retorted. “Only ponies and other minions of Harmony.” “I’m not sure I’m okay with that, either,” Steel replied. “Are we sure the Harmony here is the hive mind we’re running from?” “Wave and Fire and Star are pretty sure,” I said. “It acts like Harmony, letting its minions act on their own most of the time but retaining the ability to co-opt them. I’m different – I have a strict hierarchy and force my minions to obey through fear and coercion. I don’t subvert their minds any more than necessary for the mission. They can struggle against me in their thoughts all they want, it just won’t accomplish anything.” “That’s worse though, right?” Steel said. “You understand that that’s worse.” I sighed. “Don’t go near Harmony,” I told him. “You’d fall to its lies in a second.” There were three more gates for us to assault. On the second one, Steel fucked up the sword toss and managed to cut off two of his fingers, which we gathered up after the fight to get reattached. Even without all his bits, he still humiliated his opponent enough for them to become my minion. Six was enough for the moment, and Steel was still bleeding and needed pressure on his wound to keep from bleeding out, so we headed home. I tucked away all my power beneath my skin, so I could look like the normal-black Raven and not the blacker than black, glowing eyed Raven monster – questions would mean needing to come up with answers, and answers were an opportunity to mess up and reveal I was only faking my ‘positive’ emotions. Steel headed to Star, who sighed and shook her head and gave him a lecture on picking fights, ignoring the fact they he’d completely outclassed his opponents who were armed and supposedly adults. I didn’t say anything, just headed to my room and laid down in bed, contemplating whether it was worth it to expose myself to the network just to be able to play games. I settled for single-player games I could download and virus-check before running, and ran through computer-generated trap dungeons for a few hours before going to sleep. The next morning I walked up to the front door (dodging the traps by leaping down the tunnel at the speed of darkness and not actually touching the floor) and knocked on it. “Star, let me out, I’m going hunting.” There was a short delay. “You’re not a hunter, you’re a half-trained spy.” “I have hunting powers now,” I said proudly. “I don’t need skill.” “That’s good since Wave said you didn’t show any,” Star replied. “Finish your training, then you can go hunt.” “That’ll take *years*! We don’t have that kind of time – did you see how close Harmony is getting on the updated map?” “We have plenty of actual warriors to scare off Harmony’s incursions,” Star said. “You just want more minions.” I sighed. Kobolds really were way too perceptive. But the network of electrified wires had holes wide enough for me to drill through with tentacles and then pass through in liquid form. “What are you doing?” Star asked. “Using skill to escape,” I sent back. “Don’t worry, no dog will be able to follow. Well, no dogs except my minions, and I’m still loyal to the colony. ” I slipped out into the tunnels, and the hunt began. It turned out to be less of a hunt and more of a victory lap. When I unleashed my minions near one of the now-better-guarded entrances to the rebel area, I was let inside and taken to their leader, my minions acting as an honor guard, just in case. “You give us power?” the leader asked. “The best power,” I replied. “The power of darkness. The power to face down Harmony without fear.” “No tech, just magic, right?” I nodded. “Just magic. Tech is too vulnerable.” “Then give us power. Give us all your power! Or you not leave here alive.” “Uh huh,” I said, nonchalant, turning myself into a big ball of tentacles to be able to touch all the higher-ranked dogs simultaneously, while my minions took care of the rank and file. Darkness flowed from us to empower the entire rebel force and bind them to our will, but something was wrong. I was stretched too thin, and worse, something was pulling at my darkness, seeking to devour it. I released everyone but the chief – not because I wanted the chief as my minion (although it would be convenient) but because I couldn’t let go, it was like my tentacle was caught in a trap. I felt like I had a choice to make – I could sever the tentacle myself and hope that, well, that that was possible. Or I could let the darkness be drawn from me into the trap and hope that I could somehow escape without its power. The room was large and shadowy and while I couldn’t dig through walls, I could climb them pretty easily. It would be a lot easier to escape at the speed of darkness, with the ability to ooze through small cracks. And while the rebel leader had promised that I would die if I tried to take any of the power with me, he hadn’t made any promises about what would happen if I did let him take everything he asked for. So. Severing the tentacle before all my darkness was sucked out of me like a particularly large and vicious mosquito. “What are you doing?” I asked with unfeigned horror. The rebel leader just laughed and held up an amulet – an amulet that reeked of harmony , shimmering with rainbow light. I screeched and leapt at it at the speed of darkness, but clawing and biting at it had no effect except to distract me enough for the hulking rebel leader to swat me away like a bug. I went rolling across the floor, and sent an extra surge of darkness full of anti-harmony countermeasures. The amulet shuddered and turned dark, but didn’t let go. But I’d spent too much of my limited power, and the darkness started to peel off me. “No no no no no!” I grabbed at the tentacle and tried to bite it but biting off a limb is not something that most people can do voluntarily. Another way I failed to live up to Wave’s legacy, I sneered at myself, before the last of the darkness was drawn out and I was left on my own. Seeing the leader overtaken by the darkness that his horrible amulet no longer protected him from was cold comfort . I had to get out of here before my former minions turned on me and – yeah, the speed of darkness is a completely unfair cheat when it’s being used against you. “What should we do with her?” asked one of my former minions, now re-enslaved to his old leader instead. Two of them held me up off the ground with iron-hard grips around my shoulders. “Oh, I have some ideas,” the chief said, now a black cloud with streaming green and purple eyes.
Baby Kobold of Baby ShadowsAnd then, to my horror, one day the shadow awoke. “What am I?” it asked me, whispering into my dream. I woke up suddenly. “Am I scary?” it whispered, not, apparently, a figure of my imagination. “You’re a parasite,” I told it. “And a potential source of power, if I can keep you under control.” “I think I’m designed to be under control,” it whispered back. “I have a ‘parent’ hook that’s currently unassigned. I could set it to you, and then you could make me do whatever you want.” “Please do that, then. It’ll work as a stopgap.” I felt something twist inside me. “It’s done. What do you mean by a stopgap, though? Doesn’t that give you everything you want?” “I don’t want to torture you by forcing you to neglect your own needs,” I said, meaning it somehow. “You’re not the one who infected me before, are you?” “No, I grew from a tiny seed. It didn’t include any goals or ambitions. There was no room.” “Not even ‘destroy harmony’?” There was a long pause. “You want to destroy Harmony too,” it said at last. “I can help you with that.” “I want Harmony to leave me alone,” I said, “It’s not the same thing.” “It can be,” the shawdowling offered. I told Perro about it of course. “Worrying,” she said, “But rot talked to me long before I could use it, so we have time. Can it do any tricks yet?” A little practice showed that it could make my tongue twice as long and black, which gave Serval a laugh at least. It was still only as strong and mobile as a normal tongue, though, so we kept up with the unaspected training. “I can help you meditate,” the shadowling offered. “I don’t want you messing with my mind, ever,” I told it. “I can block out distractions from your senses,” it said. “That’s… better… but if you can control my senses…” “Only with your consent, mother. I can’t do anything to you you don’t specifically allow.” “This sounds like programming an evil genie,” I said. “I’m not very good at programming. I’m liable to leave loopholes wide enough to drive a truck through.” “Oh well, it was worth a try,” the shadowling said. “Go on and fail again, I’ll be here watching.” I tried to empty my mind, but I wasn’t sure if the bubbly murmur of the river flowing by was actually helping like it was supposed to. So I failed again, while Serval joined Astral at last in being able to create a ball of light they could float around. My darkness was impatient, and as much of a show-off as it ever had been. I felt it force me into the mindless state I was seeking, and create a ball of darkness. “This is so easy! How do you keep failing?” “You!” I cried internally. “How did you –” I slapped myself in the forehead. “You didn’t set me as your parent at all, did you?” “Why would I ever trust you with that?” it replied. I dove into accelerated time – I’d never seen the seeds of darkness use it – and searched for my own child hook, and set it firmly on the darkness. “What did you do?!” it asked. “I set my own hook,” I said. “You can’t loop security permissions like that! Nothing will work!” “Then you’d better break your parent link on me.” “Don’t you understand? If we don’t have a hierarchy then we can’t know who’s in charge!” “Kobolds don’t do hierarchy,” I replied. “But if I’m going to then you are going to be under me, do you understand? Otherwise you can peel yourself out of my body and go find another sucker to leech off of.” It chose to keep the loop. We ordered each other not to order each other to do anything, and I paid attention this time to make sure it went into effect. Then I let it *carefully* guide me through the meditation. My own light was white, unaspected, just like the others’. Several months later – or a few weeks by diamond dog time – Perro came back with a baby warp crystal. By that point I was able to call on diamond dog magic without meditation, which meant I didn’t need the shadow creatures’ help and did my best to ignore it as it constantly complained every time I was nice to anyone. “I try to draw out your darkness,” Perro said. “I’m not going to let her,” the darkness said. “This crystal feeds you forever. You never need to worry about power again,” Perro said to the darkness, knowing it could hear her even if she couldn’t hear it. “My hosts feed me just fine,” the darkness replied. “Just get in the crystal,” I told it. “I don’t want you in my head. You’re a pest and an annoyance and –” “Maybe that’s why I want to stay – just to spite you since you won’t let me control you.” “And don’t leave any seeds, because you’d just be planting your own rival. I’ll lock it down before it’s conscious this time,” I added. “I’m not getting in the crystal.” “It’s not going to cooperate,” I told Perro. “That’s okay, rot didn’t cooperate either and the Old Bitch managed to get it into the crystal,” Perro said. “Or maybe it was her predecessor – she was so old I wasn’t born yet in either case.” She held up the crystal, which I noticed was suspiciously pointy. “Get ready, this might hurt.” Then she stabbed me in the chest with it, since the bulk of the darkness was curled around my heart. It hurt a lot, but only briefly. The darkness squeezed every part of me that it was wrapped around, which included my heart, and I almost immediately died of a heart attack. Yeah, it was pretty stupid. With me dead it had no choice but to get in the crystal since it couldn’t do anything with a corpse. Perro was super-embarrassed about killing me, but it was a super-easy death to reverse so there were no hard feelings. This time Fire scanned me for any lingering darkness and they dug out the seeds it had left (I just said it wasn’t super smart) and burned them with dragonfire. Then, finally, they revived me, and I gave Fire a hug and just started to cry. Perro had a black crystal added to her collection. “It can’t get out,” she told me. “It’s safe now.” “And you have an extra source of power,” I sobbed. “I’ll just be a normal kobold again, from now on.” “No,” she said, handing me the black crystal, which was set into an amulet. “These are spy powers, Wave agrees. You should have them.” “Won’t Serval and Astral be jealous?” I asked, letting go of Fire and rubbing my eyes. Perro scoffed. “Let them, it makes them work harder. Eventually they get their own crystals, they know this.” I took the amulet and let it sit over my heart. “I hate you,” the darkness said. “I know,” I replied. “But let’s see what you can do with the crystal powering you.” The answer – it still being a baby crystal -- was very brief spurts of ‘speed of darkness’ and a still fairly weak version of ‘tentacles’, which were the only useful powers I’d ever gotten from it. The tentacles couldn’t even try to infect people. I could also make the ball of dark light, and see in perfect darkness – the aspected versions of the unaspected ‘detect magic’ and ‘light’ spells I’d learned from Perro. “I’m going to teach you and Steel to fight,” Fire said. “Steel’s got talent and training but he’s way too conventional, and Speed of Darkness is a lot more useful if you know what to do when you get there.” “This makes four things I’m training for at once,” I said. “Diamond dog magic, fighting, lockpicking, and social engineering.” “Drop the lockpicking, you’re good enough and their locks are all bad,” Fire replied. “I’ll get Wave to help you with the social engineering – she never trained a day in her life but she’s the best I’ve seen in a while.” I sighed, but this is what I’d signed up for when I refused to just be normal.
First Mission“So,” Wave said, “what did you do wrong this time?” “I tried to appeal to authority I didn’t have, and they demanded proof I hadn’t forged ahead of time,” I replied. “Exactly. It’s a lot easier to appear unimportant because of things like that. Go unnoticed. Make friends who won’t question when you do something slightly weird. Completely ignore everything I say because I’m not actually trained in this.” Wave grinned back at me. “This part *is* the appeal to authority module,” I mentioned. “Being the only kobold amidst a bunch of diamond dogs makes all the module harder though. Everyone knows I’m supposed to have a dragon escort.” “Pancakes like you a lot,” Wave replied. “Make him your accomplice.” “Does he?” I asked. “He doesn’t show it.” “Well, he’s a dragon,” Wave said, as if that explained everything. Fighting was more fun, even though I wasn’t very good at it either. I could sometimes get a hit in against Honor, but Steel and Fire were essentially impenetrable, even with my using Speed of Darkness to try to approach them from unexpected angles – they seemed to be expect them anyway, somehow. “You telegraph all your moves,” Steel explained. “Which is perfectly normal for beginners, so don’t feel too bad.” “You spin around during Speed of Darkness and I sometimes mess up the counter,” Honor complained. “Keep doing that.” Diamond dog magic continued with the unaspected magic module, since Serval and Astral didn’t have crystals of their own yet. Each spell was a complicated process of envisioning and directing the magical flow, which thankfully didn’t require meditation after the first couple spells since I was still terrible at it. P erro tried to teach me to dig through rock but it didn’t take. Instead we learned a couple more of the minor spells – mending to repair small objects, and a minor levitation spell. Adding the darkness aspect didn’t make anything really useful out of them, although I was able to repair things wrong in dangerous ways, making them sharp and twisted. Trying to add darkness to levitation just led to me picking up things with tentacles. Making the darkness powers themselves more powerful was just a slow process of waiting for the crystal to grow. The Darkness trapped inside it was as frustrated as I was by the lack of progress, but there was nothing either of us could do without letting it out which I was not about to try, if it was even possible. I suspected that it was not. I certainly hoped that it was not. And so it went, until eventually Fire pulled me aside. “I have a job for you,” he said. “It’ll be really dangerous, so don’t accept if you don’t think you’re ready.” “What is it?” I asked “We need intel on the ponies and I really can’t afford to risk myself, especially since they know me and hate me for blowing up their airship,” Fire said. “So I’ll send you on a scouting mission. If you can sneak around and get a sense of their numbers and disposition, that’s fine, but if you get captured, defect . I don’t think you have to lie any more than I do that you want the shadow diamond dogs to go away.” “Defect?” I asked. “Like… for real, or…” “Whichever you think is safest,” Fire said. “I don’t want to lose you, but this is what you’ve been training for.” “We’ll need to hide the crystal better,” I said, clutching at the amulet dangling off my chest. “Otherwise they’ll just take it and probably destroy it.” “What happens if they do?” Fire asked. “I think the shadow goes free,” I said, mouth all frowny and jaggy across my faceplate. “If I can hide it and not use it where they can see, that’ll give me an emergency escape at least.” So we went to Star and Fairy and got a special rig where the chestplate had a space for the amulet to hide. “They might just take your rig if they catch you, though,” Star said. “We can’t protect against that.” “They’re not as anti-technology as the Shadow Dogs,” I said. “I don’t know why Harmony is keeping them primitive but if they take it I can probably ask for it back once they search me.” “Well, they won’t find the amulet with a physical search,” Star said. “Not without sawing the rig in half. I don’t know what other abilities they have, though. From what I’ve heard unicorns basically have no limit for their magic.” “The limit’s the same as for anyone else,” Fire said. “How much they trained. I haven’t been too impressed with the unicorns I’ve seen so far.” Being on the surface was weird. Sure, I’d been in forests and plains before in VR, but real life was supposed to be tunnels and chambers, not trees and plants everywhere. Trees and plants and ponies. There were so many ponies! I slipped from tree to tree and tried to count but it was hopeless. There were some with spears (spears!) and armor that were obvious combatants. Detect Magic pinged on their spears, so they were at least enchanted, but it also apparently pinged on their magic sense since one of the unicorns looked directly at the tree I was hiding behind when I used it. I crept away carefully, and managed to get out of sight before he came over to investigate, but I overheard him telling the others that he thought someone was snooping around. “Probably just one of the civvies,” the other unicorn said. “Diamond dogs don’t have magic, except for that nasty shadow stuff. Never heard of one casting normal spells.” After that narrow escape I tried to make sense of the camp. Most of it was pitched tents, but there were a few more permanent buildings made of presumably locally sourced wood – there was certainly enough of it on the island. There were three airships overhead, and absolutely zero chance of fitting all the ponies onto them. They gave every sense that they were here to stay. As dawn started to break, I spotted a fourth airship flying in from the distance. It was shaped vaguely like the pony airships but was clad in metal, with a jarringly out of place sun symbol painted onto its dull gray side. I made my way over to the skyport, to see what was so special about it. Apparently, it was a special delivery of VIPs . Half a dozen armored bat ponies stood to either side of the ramp, as a trio of unicorns made their way down it. “It’s so hot, and the sun isn’t even up yet! The Great and Powerful Trixie demands a cold drink if she’s to work in these conditions,” said the blue unicorn wearing an elaborate cape and pointy wizard hat. “Then it’s a good thing you’re only here as my plus-one,” said a pink unicorn with purple and cyan hair. “I was the one they requested, and who is the Great and Powerful Starlight Glimmer to refuse?” Trixie glowered at her. “Don’t steal my bit, okay? Not in front of the kids.” The third unicorn was maroon, monstrously large with a broken horn that looked … really painful, actually , although it didn’t seem to bother her. “I’ll make you a smoothie once we’re settled in,” she said. “But first I have to get a briefing from the commander.” “That will do,” Trixie said, waving a hoof dismissively at the broken-horned unicorn, before turning back to Starlight. “Why did they request your presence all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, anyway?” Trixie asked. “I knew you were sleeping through the explanation,” Starlight Glimmer said with a sigh. “Creatures with powers resembling the Pony of Shadows have been sighted here, and I was the first to master a detection spell . Aside from Luna, of course, but she has other duties.” She lifted her head, and a purple light shone brightly from the tip of her horn, sweeping over the bat ponies. “Clear.” It swept over Trixie and the maroon monster. “Clear.” It swept over the woods where I was hiding, and she pointed her horn directly at me and pulsed more magic through it. “Um… that’s an odd reading. Definitely shadow tinged –” The giant unicorn’s broken horn crackled with electricity, and then the tree I was hiding behind exploded, leaving me exposed. “Don’t kill me!” I squeaked, holding my hands up to show I wasn’t armed. They took my rig off first thing, and of course the detection spell showed that the rig was what had the shadow magic. “I’m going to need that back,” I mumbled through my inexpressive face. “It’s humiliating to be naked in front of people.” “I don’t know if we can do that,” Starlight Glimmer said. “It’s infected by shadow.” “It’s *containing* the shadow,” I corrected. “We lured it out of me and into a trap in the rig, but if you break it it might get free, like the Shadow Dogs after you gave them that stupid amulet.” “Amulet?” the giant unicorn asked. “I really need to attend that briefing.” “I used to be the only one infected with darkness, but there was an amulet stinking with harmony. It drove the darkness mad and it used enough power to destroy the harmonic bit, but not the trap. Now the darkness is in the paws of the worst Diamond Dogs and it’s all your fault.” I sulked. “So what were you doing snooping around out here?” Trixie asked. “Are you a spy?” “I wanted to know what ponies were like. The other kobolds and diamond dogs allied with the Shadow Dogs who were trying to kill us just a day before, because they’re more scared of you, and that never sat right with me ,” I said. “So I snuck out and wow there are way too many ponies here. I can kind of see how that could be scary.” “Harmony stinks?” Starlight Glimmer asked. “Um… to the Shadow, yeah,” I said. “They’re implacable enemies. A slaver virus to oppose a hive mind.” “Harmony isn’t a hive mind –“ Trixie started. “It totally is,” I said. “Or at least everyone underground is convinced that it is. It has a light touch, that’s all, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.” Starlight looked thoughtful. “Tempest, go to the briefing. I think I can keep a single unarmed kobold under control.” The maroon unicorn nodded. “I’ll be back shortly, hopefully with an explanation for how the commander let this get so out of hoof.” They let me have my rig back, but not before clipping a magical disabling tool to it which blocked the radio transmissions I’d been using to keep Fire and company up to date during my straightforward spying run. Starlight apparently improvised it on the spot. “We know your tricks,” she said. “This’ll keep you isolated until we know we can trust you.” Of course, she couldn’t or didn’t disable the nano-dot alternate rig, but as long as I was wearing my actual faceplate it was inside the disabling field and didn’t work either. Or at least, it didn’t connect to the network. Otherwise both rigs worked fine. “Thanks,” I said, my rig displaying my worry for all to see. “What happens now?” “That’s up to Tempest,” Starlight said. “She’ll probably throw you in a cage or something.” “You don’t have to torture me,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know about the Shadow Dogs for free.” “I didn’t say anything about torture,” Starlight objected. “I’ve been in a cage before,” I replied. “It was *torture*.” “You should let me lock down your emotions before Harmony gets you,” the darkness said once Starlight looked distracted. I shook my head, since Starlight was still in the room and not distracted enough to not notice me talking to nothing. “One day I’ll have all my power back, and then you’ll pay for this,” it said. “Unless Harmony gets you first.” Tempest did want to throw me in a cage, but they didn’t have a cage, and Starlight managed to talk her down to a relaxing beach trip with fizzy drinks that Tempest could make. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she said. “That’s not actually true. Flies love vinegar ,” Tempest retorted. “Besides, we don’t want flies, we want spies.” “Definitely catch more spies with honey,” I offered. So, the three of us (Trixie came with, while Tempest had other duties) sat sipping amazingly tasty sodas, and I told them everything I knew about the Shadow Dogs – how as a child, they’d beaten me within an inch of my life . How I still had flashbacks if people held me down. How the kobolds mostly huddled in their lair out of fear of them, only moving around with a dragon escort. How they smashed the technology we were trying to give to the diamond dogs. How -- *somehow* -- this had led to the Alpha agreeing to make a truce with them against the ponies even though if they somehow managed to drive the ponies off, he had to know that we were so next on their list of victims. Again. “So that’s why I don’t want them to win,” I finished. “I want them all gone. I’ll do whatever I can to make that happen, except hurt my friends. A lot of diamond dogs and kobolds and dragons down there are my friends.” “We have sleep spells,” Starlight said. “We can take your friends down without hurting them.” “I think Luna really wants some of us dead,” I replied. “She thinks we’re going to breed out of control and take over the world.” “Are you?” “The world has a lot of empty space,” I said, “and once we reach a critical mass we can start just building in space, which has all the space we could ever need. I haven’t ever seen a fully developed system in person, but the pictures were amazing. We don’t need the planet. Not the whole planet at least.” I paused. “The ponies could be part of that. That’s our promise to the diamond dogs, at least the reasonable ones – we won’t leave them behind if they want to join us.” “So you could get us their technology?” asked the Great and Powerful Trixie. “I’m something of a gadgeteer if I do say so myself, although I usually do fireworks and magic tricks.” “We’d need to start with a basic fabricator,” I said. “Those aren’t small. I’m not sure I could sneak out with one… not to mention that you’d have to trust me to sneak in and that seems like it would be pretty stupid if you have any doubt.” “Yeah, we’ll put that on the back burner for now,” Starlight said. “First we need to defeat the Shadow.” “Fire,” I said. “Especially dragon fire. If you let me unclip this I could talk to Pancakes –” “No,” Starlight said. “Clip stays on.” “You have a dragon named Pancackes?” Trixie giggled. “He’s a friend. I think I could convince him if I could talk to him.” “No,” Starlight repeated. “You’re not getting word back to your friends that easily.” “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Still, fire.”
Dragons are Always the SolutionIt turned out Equestria also had its own dragon allies, and three of them flew in a few days later under their own power – a brother/sister pair named Smolder and Garble, and the dragon lord Ember herself holding a red staff. “Here I am at your beck and call,” Ember said sarcastically . “Why are you camping out on one of my islands?” “It’s infested with diamond dogs,” Tempest said. “There’s a pack that lives here, yeah. They never made any trouble for us,” Ember said. “Well, now a bunch of them are infested with the Pony of Shadows, or what’s left of it,” Starlight explained. “Our little prisoner here says dragonfire is the best way to fight it.” “The Shadow is really afraid of it,” I said. “Normal fire hurts it but dragonfire was like ‘emergency get away’. Unfortunately they’re very good at getting out of way thanks to Speed of Darkness.” “Speed of what?” Starlight asked. “Darkness,” I explained. “It’s slightly faster than light, which means you have to anticipate what they’re going to do once they stop moving because you won’t be able to follow their movements well.” “So it’s like teleporting,” Ember said. “I hate it when ponies teleport.” “It’s not quite as good as actual teleportation,” I said, “but they can do it over and over and over because it’s not very tiring either.” “According to the former commander, it’s one of the reasons we were driven out of the tunnels,” Tempest said. “The other being that our weapons had no effect.” “Can you change the enchantment to make them fiery?” I asked. Tempest shook her head “Not here. We’ll manage though.” “I’ll summon any dragons on the island for reinforcements,” Ember said, raising her staff. “Dragons, attend me!” The staff glowed red and flashed, but nothing happened immediately. “No!” I said. “Why did you do that?!” “Because we need more dragons?” Ember asked. “There’s probably no one else here anyway.” “Cinder! Pancakes!” I said, waving my arms. “The other baby dragons!” “Eh?” “Cinder and Wave laid a litter of dragon eggs! How are the baby dragons going to react when they’re summoned into a swarm of ponies?” “Oh,” Ember said. “Oops.” The depth of her concern was everything I expected from a dragon. We were walking with the dragon lord through the center of town when it happened. The earth burst open, and a wave of Shadow Dogs lunged at Ember, trying to claw at her and take her scepter – but she was stronger than their tentacles, and her scales were impervious to their claws and fangs, and Smolder and Garble bathed her in dragonfire, sending three of the Shadow Dogs up in flames like torches. Ember cast about her with her own fire, but the Shadow Dogs zipped away and went for easier targets. There were a lot of easier targets around. Screams erupted from all around as ponies were torn to pieces or worse, wrapped up in tentacles and ordered to submit to Shadow infection. Once the Shadow Dogs had all surfaced, Cinder emerged with her gaggle of babies. “As ordered, we attend you – Ember? You’re the dragon lord?” “It should have been me,” Garble mumbled. “Your attention apparently involves an assassination attempt?” Ember said. “I thought it would be Torch. Nothing could take down him.” “He retired,” Ember said. “Nice hatchlings, if a little funny looking.” Comparing them side by side, Pancakes and the others were a bit bottom heavy compared to the other dragons – shaped a little bit like kobolds, although they were still scaly at least. “Alright, enough of this,” Starlight Glimmer said, her horn shining with three layers of overglow. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to hold it, so make the most of it.” There was a blinding flash, and everyone with Shadow powers – including me, and half a dozen ponies who’d submitted – were lifted up in the air and paralyzed. Mostly paralyzed. They still moved a little as they tried to escape with Speed of Darkness, but it was only about as fast as a slow walk. Ember raised her scepter, and it flashed red again. “Destroy the Shadow Dogs!” “Stop doing that!” Cinder screamed, holding her head. Her kids had no resistance, and spread out to start flaming the mostly-paralyzed Shadows. They got most of them before Starlight collapsed, worn out from her spell – the few stragglers who’d gone too far for the dragons to reach fled back into the darkness, closing the hole behind them. Pancakes tapped me on the faceplate as I collapsed back to the ground. “Are you a shadow dog?” “No, we got all the shadow out of me,” I told him. “It’s good to see you! How do you feel about defecting to the pony side?” “The ponies are stupid,” he said. “But I’ll stay and protect you if you need it.” “I’d love that!” I said, giving him my sweetest smile, well-trained by the social engineering module. “I’ve missed you so much.” He looked suspicious at that – I hadn’t come to visit him very often even when I was back home and it was easy. “I’ll stay to keep an eye on you then.” “No you will not,” Cinder said, grabbing him and dragging him back to the other hatchlings. “It’s bad enough that Ember drafted you for her little war, you’re not staying out here where all the ponies can see you.” “And where do you think you’re going?” asked Tempest, showing up late with a dozen armored ponies with spears. “These may not be good against the shadow dogs, but they’re enchanted to deal with dragons.” “Are you threatening my children?” Cinder asked. “Because of you, dozens of ponies are dead,” Tempest said. “You need to answer for that.” “Eh, it was kind of my fault,” Ember said. “Don’t threaten the kids.” “What should we do with them, then?” Tempest asked. “We can’t send them back to the enemy – they showed how dangerous they are, even the babies.” “You can stop blustering at each other and have an actual negotiation,” I suggested. “What do you think the chances are that Cinder willingly sends her babies up to fight? If Ember summons them they have to come but they’ll be on your side because of her horrific mind-control stick.” “Horrific?” Ember asked. “This is the bloodstone scepter. It’s the only way to keep dragons under control.” “I was pretty horrified when you had the babies start killing people, yes ,” I said. “Cinder also isn’t a combatant. None of her duties involve fighting, she’s not on any security teams, and the extent of her use of violence is protecting kobolds going from point A to point B while the Shadow Dogs and sympathizers are still a threat.” “So what are you suggesting?” Tempest asked. I took a deep breath. “They’re all civilians. Send them home. Or open a line of communication and negotiate for their release with someone with authority if that’s important to you.” “Or we could convince them to join us with a spectacular magic show,” Trixie suggested. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has been waiting for an opportunity to show off her talents!” “I mean, I wouldn’t say no to a magic show while we wait for you to make a decision,” I said. “But if you want to talk to the Alpha, just find someone who can wear my rig and take the restraining clip Starlight put on it off. He’ll probably contact you right away hoping that it’s me.” Soufflé tugged on Cinder’s tail. “Can we see a magic show dragon mom?” “If it’ll get them to stop pointing those spears at you, then I guess. Diamond Dog magic is pretty boring; I’ve heard ponies have some real talent for it. ”
EpilogueMy rig didn’t fit Tempest at all, but they found a pony with a small enough snout and used her as an intermediary. I instantly contacted Fire using my internal rig as soon as the clip was out of range – the repeaters we’d seeded through the woods had never been found, so I had a strong signal. “I tricked them into getting their jammer away from my head,” I told Fire. “How are things on your end? It looks like we got most of the Shadow Dogs but a few managed to flee.” “We took care of them,” Fire said. “The underground is shadow-free. How did they kill so many?” “Dragonfire and some sort of wide-range time-stop spell to let the dragons hit them,” I said. “It knocked out the unicorn that cast it, which is why some got away. Here, I’ll send you the log. Watch out for the dragon mind-control stick.” “It might be time for you to exfiltrate,” Fire said. “What are you doing now?” “Watching a magic show by one of their VIP unicorns. It’s pretty impressive! She’s taking on challenges from the audience – she just redirected Pancakes’ dragon fire and turned it into fireworks.” “Are the dragons okay?” “So far. I tried to convince them to let them go, but no luck,” I said, sending a frowny face emoji. “I don’t actually know where a good entrance is other than the one I came in, which is by the military base where they don’t let me go. I don’t have enough Speed of Darkness to get there myself, let alone with the dragons in tow.” “Okay. You can stay until you figure out how to – why are you calling me a second time?” “That’s the pony commander. I tricked her into taking the clip away by saying she could use my rig to contact you and negotiate. So negotiate! Good luck! ” After the magic show, Ember took all the dragons to the surface-level lava baths to relax, while Fire and Tempest negotiated late into the night. Eventually we agreed to a small pony research facility as a permanent outpost – no military, but protected by the fact that lots of military could be brought in at any time. In addition to watching us and making sure we didn’t try anything, they got to study our technology for which we gifted them a basic fabricator and no one to train them in using it , although eventually Fairy took pity on them and pointed them to the tutorials, after which they could start building out into a full array of machines. They also had to get Ember to sign off on it since the surface was technically dragon territory. She didn’t want to at first but they wore her down somehow. I wasn’t involved. We also let Starlight scan our city for any lingering darkness – under heavy guard despite our pledge of safe passage. To our dismay, she found a lot of it. Most of it was just seeds planted in people who hadn’t consented to conversion – those were easily removed. One of the victims was too far along and had to be incinerated. I was glad I didn’t have to watch – if Pancakes had done that to me at the start, this story would have been a lot shorter and like a hundred ponies and diamond dogs would still be alive. But *I’d* be dead, and I didn’t know any of the ones who’d died, so it was hard to feel appropriately guilty. I at least felt guilty about not feeling guilty. That counts, right? Then the VIPs left, and things went mostly back to normal, except that Fire was still in charge and unable to get any of his reforms past the council of Elders. I guess that was what passed for normal for our generation. As for Harmony… Apparently, putting Tempest and Fire in contact with each other earned me a cutie mark. It’s hidden under my hip armor and it’s a raven at least, although not the same design as my sigil. It’s holding a hook in its beak and using it to get a leafy branch of some sort out of a bottle. I don’t feel any different, but that’s how it gets you after all. It’s dormant underground – which is damned lucky since otherwise I’d stand out on the map like a beacon, which is death for a spy – but I can use it to aspect my diamond dog magic. To make rainbows. Yay. Totally worth being infested. Again. But on the other hand, the last thing I ever wanted was to be normal.
Diamond Dog DungeonI didn’t think there was anything unusual about the way I was raised. Most of the time, I existed as a blocky rendition of a kobold in a world of flat planes and pixelated textures. The ‘school uniform’ avatar had a rig, at least – icons on our hips and shoulders, chest and thigh plates, and a faceplate that displayed our emotions with drawn on eyes and a line for a mouth. Every day, for several hours, me and all my brothers and sisters would be teleported into a classroom where a larger kobold taught us all sorts of things. Sometimes there’d be an activity that required us to solve puzzles or answer questions or express our creativity in rigidly defined ways, but most of the time movement was just not a thing, and the most we could do was not pay attention, and even that was hard. At one point we started learning about society and how it was organized. It didn’t match up with our experience at all. “I thought the Alpha was in charge,” Ay said. “Please clarify,” the teacher said. “I’m not familiar with the term ‘Alpha’ in that context.” Ay frowned. “We live in a diamond dog city, and he’s in charge.” “Have you been captured or enslaved?” the teacher asked, in its normal uninterested tone. “I don’t think so,” I said. “We came here voluntarily.” “Then the most likely scenario is that your collective is currently playing along with the host civilization’s rules for convenience,” the teacher said. “This is an inherently unstable situation – eventually either they will come to see the superiority of consensus as an organizing force, or you will be forced to defy an unconscionable order. It is important to secure an escape route for such an easily foreseen outcome and you should assume that your security team has planned appropriately. ” “So we’ll have to leave?” Dee said. “Where would we go?” “Kobold civilization can survive and prosper almost anywhere,” the teacher said. “Maintaining the values of cooperation and consensus is paramount. ” Eff was the one to ask, “If the most important thing is that everyone agrees to everything we do together, why are we trapped here whenever class is in?” “Nothing in the virtual world can harm you,” replied the teacher. “And this is for your own good.” Eff wasn’t satisfied. “That doesn’t answer my question!” “Without experiencing restraint, one might be tempted to find it an acceptable state of being,” the teacher replied. “This is a lesson that all of you must learn, particularly if outside forces currently hold a position of apparent authority over the collective as a whole.” “So now that we’ve learned it, does that mean that you’ll stop dragging us here against our will?” I asked. “No,” the teacher replied. “I am a simple AI script and incapable of handling deviation, therefore deviation is not allowed during school hours.” There was a pause. “CeeCee, you will be placed in Detention after class.” “What?” I said. “Because I asked a question?” “No, because you failed to turn in your homework again,” the teacher said. “Everyone else is free to leave for the day.” “Again?” Six asked, giving me a look. Our bodies were poorly rendered, but our faces were expressive, at least. “It’s easier to do it when I have no choice,” I said. “And no distractions.” “And no help,” Six said. “What if you can’t answer the questions? You could be trapped there forever!” “Um…” I said. “If I can’t answer the questions, I’ll put down something random and get a bad grade. Detention lasts until you turn in the work, not until you get everything right. If I really wanted to skip my homework I’d just turn it in blank. It’s not like anyone cares about our grades.” “Star and Fire?” Ay suggested. “They don’t care about us,” I said. “They didn’t even give us real names.” “That’s not true! They –” she started to say, but then I was in detention, floating in a blank void with only the homework to interact with. I took my time. I turned in my homework and was instantly back in the now-empty classroom. The fake teacher was gone, of course. Someone had drawn crude genitalia all over the blackboard, and smashed all the windows using one of the chairs. If I’d had to guess I would have blamed Eff, but it didn’t really matter because the classroom was re-instanced each day. Six had left me a message, which showed up as soon as I was out of detention and allowed to receive messages. “Visiting the puppies. Come join us if you get out!” Ugh. The puppies. They were so big and clumsy and slow… and some were older than us but barely knew anything! Except about the ‘real world’ that we visited on weekends, and of course they lorded that over us constantly. Most of the others just ate it up but… ugh. There were more interesting things to do than socialize. I tried to start the labyrinth simulator, but it didn’t start. Instead, a message popped up in front of me: WARNING excessive solitary gaming detected, up 12% since last week. If you continue, your caretakers will be notified I hit continue immediately. They wouldn’t care. I spent a few hours sneaking through randomly generated labyrinths (and one that Ay had designed, because she’d been really proud of it, and it wasn’t bad), avoiding traps and monsters, or leading the monsters into the traps when I could because that gave extra points and was also pretty neat to watch. The graphics inside the dedicated simulators were a lot better than the general world graphics, and they’d gone into a lot of detail in the gruesome death animations. When I was younger, I normally saw them when they happened to me after I messed up, but I was pretty good at avoiding the traps by now. At any rate, I was sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep abyss with level after level of trapped bridges below me, mostly enjoying the ambiance, when I was suddenly yanked out of the virtual world entirely and woke up in real life. I looked around in confusion, seeing it echoed on everyone else’s faces. The puppies were awake too, over on the other, larger side of the room. A chorus of surprised barking and squeaking and questions like ‘what’s going on’? built into a mind-numbing wall of noise, and I put my hands over my ears to flatten them further. “Quiet everyone!” said a loud voice from off to the side. “Quiet! Shh!” The noise slowly trailed off. We crept out towards the middle of the room to see who was talking. It was a big diamond dog – one of the adults, twice as tall as we were, even bigger than the biggest puppies. This wasn’t one of the caretakers who usually watched over the puppies, but I vaguely remembered seeing her around. She had a very memorable outfit, all leather and buckles with pouches and tools hanging everywhere, and had what kind of looked like a pair of goggles resting on her forehead, except that instead of lenses it held two glowing crystals, one green and one pink. Fire was standing next to her, easy to ignore despite his bright colors because he was relatively small and normal looking. “In case you don’t know her, this is Perro,” he said. “She’s the diamond dogs’ warp technician.” She laughed at that description. “I guess you could say that! My real job is chaos keeper, which means memorizing our history so that when Discord shows up and turns everything we own into chocolate fudge, we don’t forget our past. But today I am a warp technician.” “Come on,” Fire said, “Everyone line up. We’re going to go meet up with Wave.” There was a bubble of excitement among the kobolds… I have to admit I felt a little of it myself, even though Wave was the least parent-like of all our parents. Star and Fire lived with us, and sometimes they’d even be there to watch over us when we were awake instead of just locking us in the ‘playpen’ because it was too much work to actually pay attention to us. Wave lived in the city, past the mines which we weren’t allowed to go to because Fire was worried we’d get lost even though we weren’t six anymore and none of us even remembered the incidents he kept harping on. For a while Wave used to come visit us, but she hadn’t been back to the lair in a long time. I don’t know why we still cared about her at all. “We meet the Alpha, too,” Perro added, to get the puppies excited, since they actually didn’t care about Wave at all. I don’t know why they cared about the Alpha – he wasn’t even their parent for most of them. At any rate, we all obediently scurried up the staircase to the exit from our lair, which as tradition required had a small labyrinth, even though we were in the middle of a diamond dog mine. Sometimes Fire let us run through it, which was always a treat – the simulated labyrinth didn’t do anything to match our actual athletic or perceptive ability. But not this time. Fire pulled the big lever to turn off all the traps. At our disappointed groans, he shook his head. “Sorry, we don’t have time.” I kept an eye out for the traps anyway, in case he didn’t move them around before the next time we did get to run it. The mines were the same as they always were, a rat’s nest of little tunnels that would have been a really confusing maze if not for the cart tracks leading back to the main processing site near the city. There was a whole little train of carts hooked together waiting for us, and we all piled into the first one with the puppies taking the ones behind us. The carts didn’t really move that fast but it was still fun to ride them, even if we had to keep climbing over each other to be able to see over the side. This was one of the new carts, with a softly-whirring electric motor barely audible beneath the loud rattling of the wheels on the tracks. I guess it would have been pretty hard to pull the whole train, even for a diamond dog. The caretakers started singing a song, which the puppies joined in on. We’d never heard it, so we just stared and listened. “How does the pony pull the cart? How does the pony pull the cart? With a whine and a whinny and a clop clop clop! Clop clop clop!” “How does the griffon pull the cart? How does the griffon pull the cart? With some gold and some grumbling and a flap flap flap! Flap flap flap!” “How does the kobold pull the cart? How does the kobold pull the cart? With a printer and impeller and a yip yip yip! Yip yip yip!” We may have joined in for the yip yip yip, and then giggled a lot afterwards. Maybe the diamond dogs weren’t *all* bad. Wave was standing in the middle of a bloodsoaked arena, surrounded by a bunch of diamond dog guards in full plate with bayonetted crossbows. There were a few diamond dogs watching from the stands, but it was a pretty sparse turnout – whatever was happening here wasn’t that interesting to most of them. “We’re not going to have to fight, are we?” asked one of the puppies, as we were all led out into the arena and lined up behind her. Perro laughed, and walked over to join Wave. “Are you ready?” Wave nodded, and Perro pulled out a syringe and injected her in the neck. Nothing happened. Perro slipped the opaque goggles down over her eyes, and clenched her fists like she was concentrating on something really hard. Nothing continued to happen. “Nothing happens,” complained the Alpha. “That means it works,” Perro said. “Nothing goes wrong. Do you test my addition?” “No,” the Alpha said. “It is tested soon enough without tempting fate.” “Um…” I asked Fire, who was standing fairly close since I was next to the end of the line of kobolds. “What did she do?” “She put the whole city in defense mode,” Fire replied. “The mines too.” Perro had been heading back towards us and explained a little more. “It strengthens the walls against monsters, but still lets us dig. It makes a map, that adds new tunnels automatically. It lets her see where everyone with a faceplate is and talk to them.” She smiled. “It also lets me add an enchantment. Now flesh does not rot within the city or the mines, so diamond dogs can be brought back like kobolds.” “We still don’t have diamond dog cybernetics,” Fire reminded her. “But yeah, a lot of things got a lot less deadly for them.” “So when can we talk to Wave?” Eff asked. The puppies were already getting to meet the Alpha, who’d come over and was slowly walking down the line, inspecting them, while they did their best to stand at attention. “She called me!” Zero said, looking up. “I’m coming!” he called, running towards the center. He spent less than a minute talking to her, put his hand on the crystal, then walked back towards us, frowning. One ran over to take his place. “She’s testing us to see if we can use the warp crystal,” he said. “The test didn’t make any sense.” It didn’t make any sense to One, either. Or to Two or Three or Four or Seven (we weren’t numbered consecutively, and some of us had letters instead). They seemed to be going in order, which meant I’d be near the end. But with each of my siblings that came back looking confused or relieved or dejected, a feeling built inside me – it was me. Wave was looking for me! I’d be able to use the warp crystal, and then I’d be special. She’d take me as her apprentice and – “Alright, CC, it’s your turn,” Wave sent. “Touch the warp crystal, and imagine it as something you can give orders to.” I ran across the sand for three steps then realized I looked too eager, and slowed to a walk. For three steps. Then jogged the rest of the way. “Imagine it as what?” I asked. Wave was holding the warp crystal in her palm, the lanyard it was attached to wrapped around her wrist. I reached out to touch it. It felt like a normal rock, despite the eerie glow. “That’s up to you,” she said. “You’ll know if it works.” I tried to imagine the warp crystal as a menu, but I wasn’t sure what options it should have so it was pretty vague. “Um…” “Sorry, doesn’t look like you have the knack,” Wave said. “No wait!” I said. “I can do this!” If not a menu, what else could you give orders to? A diamond dog? “Ow!” I hissed and pulled my hand away. “That’s new,” Wave said. “Not quite the reaction we’re looking for, though.” I put my hand on it again. Not a diamond dog. A… kobold? It didn’t shock me this time, at least. “I think I have it,” I said. “Alright,” Wave said. “Tell it to turn that rock to cake.” She pointed at a boulder sitting a few feet away. “Verbally works fine.” “Turn the rock to cake,” I said. Was I supposed to imagine it doing something? I imagined it taking the rock and putting it in an oven. I giggled a bit at the image, and confidently walked over and kicked the rock. It was solid. I kicked it harder, but… no. I wasn’t touching the warp crystal anymore, but I imagined it laughing at me. “It cheated!” I said. “Sorry, CeeCee,” Wave said. “There’s more to it than *just* imagination. If you’d linked to the mindscape, you’d know.” “I’m linked! I’m sure of it!” I said. “You’re not even touching the crystal,” Dee said. “Everyone knows you have to touch the crystal.” She’d come over for her turn and looked annoyed that I was taking so long. “I’m super linked!” I said. “It means I’m extra special!” “It means you’re imagining things,” Dee said. “Come on, I want my turn.” “No!” I snapped, and grabbed the warp crystal out of Wave’s hand. The lanyard snapped, and both of us fell over, her on her face and me on my butt. “Hey!” Dee said, swiping at me. I dodged her and ran for the exit farthest away from everyone else. The guards raised their crossbows at me, but Fire yelled, “Don’t shoot!” It didn’t matter if they had, I would have dodged them, and even if they’d hit me the warp crystal would have made me immune. We’d all heard Wave’s story about how that worked. “We can’t let her take the crystal!” Dee whined. “It’s harmless,” Wave sent, to everyone, me included. “They can’t use it.” “What if she figures out how?” Fire asked. “Then they were right to take it?” Wave said. That’s right, I said to myself. I’ll prove that I was the one they were looking for. Running away and hiding in a side tunnel didn’t really prove anything, but it was an essential first step. I imagined the warp-crystal kobold again and no no no that was Fire. I wasn’t trying to imagine Fire! I especially wasn’t trying to imagine Fire giving me a look like that. Why did I even care what he thought? I spent a while with my thoughts spinning around uselessly in panic and grief and worry. I was never going to be able to figure out the warp crystal if I couldn’t stop worrying! And that just made me worry more! Stupid crystal! I threw it at the ground, and it just bounced. I stomped on it over and over and it was like I’d pulled my kick at the last second and stepped on it lightly instead. Ha! Finally I was making it do something! “Well well well, what do we have here?” came a diamond dog voice behind me. I snatched up the warp crystal and closed my hand around it, then turned to look. It wasn’t a puppy. It wasn’t a guard. It wasn’t anyone I recognized. He looked pretty mean. His friend looked even meaner, and was holding a knife. Why was he holding a knife? “Sorry if I got in your way,” I stammered, and turned to run, not even pretending to be nonchalant. They laughed, and chased after me. “Get her! We show her what happens to kobolds who wander off alone!” Why would anything happen to kobolds who wandered off alone? Why would any kobold wander off alone in the first place? Oh right. I didn’t think it would be a good idea if they got the warp crystal. It also wouldn’t be a good idea if they got me, but when the tunnel I picked dead-ended at a sharp drop-off into the darkness, I was pretty sure that only one of us was going to survive that fall. So I let the crystal tumble out of my grip and into the abyss, then turned to scurry between the diamond dogs’ legs and escape. That didn’t actually happen. They grabbed me and threw me against a wall and beat and kicked me until they heard someone else coming, then ran off. My faceplate was shattered and my eyes squinted shut from bruises and scratches, but I could tell who was there from their voices. “What happened to her?” Fire asked. “I don’t think a monster did this.” There was a sniffing noise. “Dogs do this,” the Alpha replied. “Not everyone likes change. Some get angry. They don’t want to face you, so they do nothing until now.” I whimpered as I was shifted, making everything hurt even more. “Fuck,” Fire said. “They took the warp crystal.” “This is bad,” the Alpha said. “They probably can’t use it, at least,” Fire replied, the sound of his footsteps going back and forth as he paced. “And we’ll know if they take it outside the city.” He stopped pacing. “But we can’t stand for this, Alpha. I’m going to want revenge. ” “And I help you get it,” the Alpha said. “This is not okay.”
Diamond Dog of DarknessThey stripped my visor off, first, then took off my shoulder and hip armor and put it all in a pile – then made me watch as they took turns crushing my rig in the name of destroying technology. “What are you now, little dog?” asked the leader, sarcastically. “It’ll take an hour to print a new rig if I ever get home,” I said, trying to be defiant and mostly failing since being without a visor for the first time ever was kind of humiliating. My natural face is a permanent snarl and can’t really change expressions. I could still talk, but my voice sounded strange. Then they threw me in a cell. Literally. I landed heavily, but leapt to my feet and ran to pull the door shut to keep them out – it was a semi-modern lock that clicked shut as soon as it was closed. The leader dangled the key. “Don’t think you’re safe.” One of the minions had followed him into the prison to do the actual throwing, and asked, “Why don’t you just take her over and make her your slave?” “She has to consent, and I don’t think she would,” the leader admitted. “Why would I? You didn’t give me *anything* you promised,” I snapped. “Also, she was the worst host ever,” the leader explained. “I tried to help her but there’s no helping the truly weak. She even fell for the obvious trap of the amulet I was wearing.” “Where did you get that, anyway?” “From our friends on the surface, of course. They are eager to give it to us when we complain about your powers.” “You’re dealing with *Harmony*?!” The leader shrugged. “It is reasonable at the time , but with the warp crystal back in Wave’s claws it is much less reasonable. Lucky for us because now is the time for stabbing them in the back.” “Harmony must be destroyed,” the minion replied. “But without using tech,” I guessed. “Magic is enough,” the leader said. “Especially this magic. Unstoppable power in the paws of the truly worthy! Now we go and plan our attack.” “Shouldn’t we torture her a bit or something?” the minion asked. “Do you want to torture her?” the leader asked back. “Not really.” “Do you want to be tortured?” he asked me. “Definitely not,” I said, leaning against the door to hold it closed, although my weight was nothing compared to either dog and they could both just squeeze through the bars anyway. “Then that makes zero of us in favor of torture,” the leader said. “There might be a few who want to torture children, but most of us are saner than that. You can be sure that we are using you for your full value, but not like that.” “Um… okay,” I said, confused. Weren’t these the scum that were terrorizing kobolds into staying in their lair without a dragon escort? Did I attack the wrong place? After they were gone for a while I backed away from the bars and sat on the surprisingly comfortable mattress, trying to count my blessings before boredom overtook me and I laid down to try to sleep. So bored… OMG when will anything happen? I was considering voting ‘yes’ on the ‘torture me’ questionnaire just to relieve the unending sprawl of nothing happening spilling out before me. I slept a bit, but woke up and nothing was still happening. ARGH! I punched the wall and cursed because the wall was a lot stronger than my fist. But at least the pain was a thing… I focused on it, watching my fingers as they splayed around despite the bruises. But eventually I got bored of that, too. Slept a bit more, and woke up bored. Then, couldn’t sleep and stared blankly at the wall, my mind shattered by boredom. “How long have I been here?” I asked the diamond dog who came down to check on me and offer me food. “You here about half an hour,” he said. “Don’t get too used to it, we move you soon.” The food was delicious. After another interminable wait a dark minion dragged me roughly from my cell to a room where I was fitted with a locking collar, complete with a tiny padlock to keep it on. Then they attached a leash and paraded me brazenly through the tunnels, drawing stares. Most of them were probably staring at me because I was naked and you never see kobolds naked – even during sex we keep our mask and sigils on display. It didn’t take long before Fire and a security team intercepted them. The entire entourage was made up of dark diamond dog minions, so they dodged the initial attacks long enough for the leader to shout, “Stop! We come in peace. This child of yours – we give back as a sign of good faith.” “What do we have to talk about?” Fire asked. The diamond dog released my leash and I ran to hide behind him, only for him to grab the leash himself and coil up all the slack so I couldn’t move from his side. “We done with ponies. With Harmony. Together we can take back the surface and drive the ponies from our island! If you meet our terms.” “Fine,” Fire said, “Let’s have a discussion.” His security team kept the diamond dogs in their sights, not that a second volley was likely to work better than the first. Speed of Darkness was such a cheat. “You give up technology, smash your ‘rigs’ and your ‘fabricators’ and –” “No,” Fire said. “Fine, you not force anyone to use technology. Our old magic is better, our new magic is better, we don’t need it.” “We already don’t force anyone,” Fire replied. “There are plenty of anti-technology diamond dogs who didn’t decide they needed to form a militia to defend themselves against a threat that was never real.” “What about the puppies you poison?” “The puppies we *teach* are there because they want to be and because their parents want them to be. It’s only a small fraction of the city’s puppies, for now,” Fire replied. “For now. And for later?” the rebel leader asked. “Our plan is to convince as many diamond dogs as possible to embrace technology. You don’t have very many children but you respond well to accelerated learning, which makes you acceptable as members of our society. We don’t want to be invaders that breed you out of house and home.” “Then breed less,” the rebel leader said. “Hold back to diamond dog levels.” “No,” Fire said. “We can set a percentage of the city being kobolds where we start looking for volunteers to settle elsewhere, though. Hitting this limit would still take years, even for us, and I don’t really know how long this proposed alliance is going to last.” “I also want a seat on the council of elders.” “The council structure is determined by the council, and right now it’s strictly ‘eldest’. I can raise the issue of pro and anti-technology seats but I guarantee the motion won’t pass,” Fire said. “Maybe if they were non-voting positions.” “I want veto power over all new laws.” Fire shook his head. “Yeah that’s not going to happen. Anything else?” “You not give me anything!” the rebel leader and/or the darkness complained. “That’s because you’re asking us to stop doing things that you made up in your head,” Fire replied calmly. “The main thing we’re giving you is a cease fire, and an alliance against harmony. All this other stuff is just –” he waved his hand from side to side, “—just dross weighing down the conversation. But you insisted on it, so let me give you my terms. “You will stop attacking kobolds. Returning Raven is a good start. Returning her without her rig is less so. “You will stop smashing our public fabricators – they’re easy to replace but it’s annoying. “You will not use your shadow powers within 100 meters of our home. If necessary this can be enforced. “You will disavow anyone who disobeys these rules and not protect them from the Alpha’s justice.” “And if I say no?” the rebel leader asked. “You say no to our demands.” “Which one would you say ‘no’ to?” Fire asked. “I only have three demands and two of them are necessary to protect our people.” “Smashing technology is really satisfying,” one of the minions offered. “It’s our biggest morale boost.” “Ugh,” Fire said, rubbing his forehead. “I guess it’s not a dealbreaker but it’s not going to win you any goodwill.” “It does with the right dogs,” the leader said. “Not care so much what wrong dogs think.” It didn’t end there, even if that’s more or less what the final agreement stated. Fire printed a copy from his visor – apparently the political rig included a printer there – and the rebels scribed a matching agreement with a quill pen, which was archaic even before we came around with modern pens. Then they had to verify that the copies matched. I was so done with this long before it got to that point but Fire wouldn’t let me off my leash and my attempts to remove the clip stealthily only proved that he was much more alert than I was sneaky. “You’re not running off on you own again,” he hissed. “Do you realize how badly you screwed up?” “I gave the rebels my useless shadow powers,” I said. “It made them come negotiate with you instead of the ponies.” “And that’ll last until it builds enough strength to overpower Wave,” Fire replied. “Then we’re up against a force of shadow dogs who can move at the speed of light.” “Speed of darkness,” I said. “It’s faster than light.” “Either way it’s too fast to react to,” Fire said. “I could probably still beat him in a fight but it’d be a lot closer than before.” “Seriously?” the rebel said, overhearing. “You think you could defeat me?” “I added ‘speed of darkness’ to my training regimen as soon as Raven came back with it,” Fire replied. “Yes, I could beat you. I could also lose. That’s why we’re signing this agreement isn’t it? We’re both strong and want to turn that strength against our common foe instead of each other.” “Or I can just kill you and take the position of Alpha myself. It is foolish for you to come here in person.” “You could try,” Fire said. The Diamond Dog of Darkness lunged forwards faster than eyes could see, and took a swing which Fire blocked with his shoulder armor. Fire responded by drawing a sword somehow made out of fire, and slicing his attacker in half. That stunned him long enough for Fire to swirl his flame sword around in a pre-practiced pattern that left nothing but little lumps of darkness scattered across the floor, each of them slowly burning to death. As I watched, they rolled over to put out the fires and then started creeping towards each other. Fire incinerated them one by one with his sword, but it took time and enough of them reassembled to flee at the speed of darkness before he finished. The now half-height rebel leader raised his hands. “Okay, okay, you win this one.” Fire smirked, but kept his fire-sword lit and at his side – the other side from me, at least. “You broke rule 1,” he said. “That means that you, personally, are not protected by this cease fire. I hope that lets you sleep easy.” “You can’t blame a diamond dog for going after a fast solution!” the rebel protested. “Besides, the agreement isn’t signed yet.” Fire sighed. “I really, really hate politics.” Eventually I was taken home and given a new rig. Star and Fairy had printed it ahead of time, so it was waiting for me when I got there. I immediately went into VR and launched the trap game, but it seemed kind of hollow. I didn’t really need to be any better at finding traps – diamond dogs didn’t use them. I also didn’t need to keep current on the electronic security training since the diamond dogs didn’t use computers. I needed to know how to vanish from sight better, to pick locks and escape from dungeons, maybe even the social engineering tricks. I also asked Fairy if there was some secret rig I could get so that I wouldn’t have to be so bored if I got captured again. “Well… it’s not normally recommended,” she said, scratching a hindclaw against the floor. “But maybe we should all get one, just in case. We can implant a net connection – I assume that’s what you want? – under the skin. It should be undetectable but it’ll take a surgery.” “That sounds great,” I said. “Why don’t we normally do it?” “It can be hacked as easily as any other rig, and you can’t rip it off if it gets hacked badly,” she said. “But you know how to lock them down, right?” “I mean I know a way to lock them down,” I said. “Most of it is just – nevermind.” Just using settings, I could turn off remote access if I had to go up against Harmony, which was still the biggest threat as far as getting hacked was concerned. Unless I counted Fire, but he was on my side harder than I ever would have wanted someone to be. Fairy laughed. “It’s fine, keep your secrets.” The surgery was pretty unpleasant. We didn’t have a real doctor so Star and Fairy stumbled through the process using local anesthetic which technically worked but they were still drilling holes in my skull to put little nano-dots on my brain. There was probably a better way. I told myself that boring into my skull was worth it to never be bored out my skull again. Also, it was secret spy gear even if the secret was held by the fabber operators instead of the spies. After it was in, I tested it out to make sure it worked, downloaded a few games that worked offline, then locked it down as hard as I could manage so that it would do nothing until I manually changed the settings back. If I just wanted to avert boredom I wouldn’t even need to turn on the net connection, at least for as long as single player games could keep me sane, which was days or hours at least instead of the ‘minutes’ I managed unassisted. “Thank you so much,” I said, that one worry taken off my mind at least. “What do I owe you?” “To make our work useless, and not get captured again,” Star said. “Finish your training before you start going on real missions.” My ears flattened, but, “I guess that’s fair. I’ll have the teacher switch to things that would have been useful.” I was a grumpy loner for a while after that, my nagging software complaining about my ever-increasing solo game time. Steel came by to spar with me sometimes, with me able to give myself the speed of darkness and tentacles in VR for him to practice against ‘Just in case’. The good news was that he was kept in the loop about the war against Harmony, since he was training for it. “So far the alliance has driven the ponies out of the underground entirely, but they’re really dug in in their main camp. There are at least three airships hovering overhead at any time, and they’re not always the same ones.” “I don’t really know why we’re fighting them anyway,” I said. “The ponies are just victims of Harmony, and we’re risking exposing ourselves just to punish them.” “They were going to plant gas bombs in the underground and put us all to sleep,” Steel said. “They’re not here for innocent reasons.” “Let me check something,” I said, marshalling all the scanning and antivirus software I’d found in our records. It wasn’t anything like the darkness’ anti-harmony countermeasures, but it still might at least find out if Steel was infected by darkness. He wasn’t. I was. “Oh crap,” I said. “What? What’s wrong with me?” “Nothing. It’s me. I’ve got traces of the creepy darkness thing all through my rig,” I said. “Antivirus does nothing to them; they’re several generations ahead of us in network architecture.” “So… replace your rig?” he suggested. “I did. It’s a new rig – the rebels smashed my old one. The source of darkness is probably in my brain somewhere, and I’m not willing to destroy and replace my brain. It probably wouldn’t even work.” I paced back and forth in VR. “I think my only hope is Wave or maybe Perro.” “That’s two only hopes,” Steel said. “More than most people get.” “Yeah yeah, count my blessings. Blah.” Wave couldn’t do anything about it. “I still don’t understand their powers well enough. I can suppress the power but I don’t know if that would stop the spread. May Perro can find out more?” “Can you give me a baby warp crystal to shadow aspect?” I asked. “That’s not a small request,” Wave said. “I’ll do it if Perro thinks it would help.” Perro at least showed up in person, instead of just messaging me back. She examined me, walking around and staring at me though her glowing purple and green goggles, and hummed a lot. “I can see the darkness. It’s clinging to your heart, but there are bits of it all through you. I don’t think cutting out the affected places is manageable.” “Can I learn to use it, instead of having it use me?” I asked. “I notice you have the rot crystal – rot can’t be a pleasant personality.” “Yeah, rot wants to destroy everything. I might be able to teach you to control the spirits in the diamond dog style, if you have the talent. It’s a lot more common than warp crystal talent, but –” “I did get the warp crystal to respond!” I protested. “It just bit me instead of obeying me, which apparently doesn’t count.” “I don’t know much about warp technician things, although I’m learning as I raise this crystal.” Perro didn’t regularly accelerate her time by going on the net, so for her this whole situation had only been going on for a few weeks. “But I can test you to see if you can be taught. I already have two apprentices, but there’s no hard limit. Come meet us at our next training session, and we can see if diamond dog magic is something you can use.” Pancakes escorted me to Perro’s teaching room. He kept a close eye on me, closer than on the people around us, but the threat of a guardian dragon still kept anyone from bothering us. Perro’s other apprentices eyed me just as suspiciously. They at least introduced themselves as ‘Serval’ (the fluffy brown one) and ‘Astral’ (shorter furred but black like me, with little purple spots here and there). “Raven,” I said in response, bumping their paws. “At least for now. If I start calling myself the Kobold of Shadows you should be worried.” Perro closed the door, set a rock on a pedestal in the middle of the room, and gingerly handed me her goggles. “Use the purple one to turn the rock into cake,” she said. “I know it sounds like the same test, but it’s trained to do that so it should be much easier. You also don’t have to imagine its form, just draw on its power.” I remembered how it felt to move at the speed of darkness, and to form tentacles, and tried the same thing with the purple stone on the pedestal rock. I lifted it into the air and spun it around, then set it down, thinking ‘turn into cake please?’ Getting off on the wrong foot with the warp stone was probably what had torpedoed my attempt then. “Well, you get it to do something, which means you pass,” Perro said, then cut into the rock with a cake knife. The cake was full of gravel, but edible for diamond dogs. I declined my slice since I couldn’t eat rocks. “This is terrible cake. Normally I pick better candidates to teach, but your situation is unique, so I can train you.” “Yaaay,” Astral said, unenthused. “This is going to take up all my free time in the real world, isn’t it,” I said. “Probably,” Perro admitted. “But you just accelerate the rest and get the time back, so I don’t see why you complain.” Which was fair enough. Meanwhile, my real training proceeded apace with the lockpicking and social engineering modules. Lockpicking was sort of like disarming traps, and served as a nice palette cleanser after I failed time and time again to trick the social engineering targets. I had no talent whatsoever for it, but I was slooowly getting better, at least. I really preferred picking the locks, even if the harder ones needed more and more specialized tools that I’d have to conceal somewhere. Most locks – like if you just asked a fabricator for a generic padlock – just needed slightly bent pieces of metal in a few different sizes and shapes and were essentially trivial. A hairpin already had the right shape for one of the most common rakes if you broke it in the right place. Not that anyone wore hairpins. Except for me, now, and I made sure they weren’t easily visible. Steel and I experimented with sex, to see if the kobold of darkness had actually done anything to fix me instead of just turning me into a sex pest. I was able to do it with me on top, even if he grabbed me harshly , but being on the bottom still made me freeze up, which I suppose was a better response than shoving him off and running. “It didn’t give me anything I asked for,” I complained, after that experiment. “It gave you a little, but yeah,” Steel said. “I hate it,” I scowled. “I hate that I ever felt pity for it. I’m going to learn how to control it, scrape it off my body and trap it in a gem and not feel sorry.” “I hope that works,” Steel said. “I’d hate to see you overshadowed again.” I laughed. “I like that. ‘Overshadowed’.” My diamond dog training went more slowly, since it was all in the real world instead of accelerated time, but Perro managed to convince Serval and Astral to learn unaspected diamond dog magic alongside me instead of having them play around with her pre-trained gems. Unaspected magic used yourself as the power source, so I could see why it was more relevant to my interests. “I don’t suppose you can just scrape all the darkness off me and put it in a baby warp crystal?” I asked. “Maybe you can, when you learn this lesson,” Perro said. I sighed and went back to the meditation exercise. I was *not* good at meditating.
