end of the line

"Qli, what's our jump status?"

Koen's voice sounded weary, and perhaps a bit deeper through the horn.

"We've shifted through the paradigm barrier and completed the fateline track."

"Good. My zero chamber is starting to decay. Prepare to phase!"

With his alchemical powers running their course, we had no choice but to land in the 20th century. I called behind me to Captain Aleister.

"Prepare to phase! Sixty seconds and counting!"

The Captain flinched as arcs of electricity again spread out from my frame across the entirety of the ship. He grumbled in an obscure dialect about not being able to reach his coffin (since Koen's zero chamber could not be disturbed) as he stowed away his wooden tools and buckled himself into the chair of the weapons systems for the Bloodwing's Revenge. The chair was bedecked with and surrounded by a bewildering array of dials, pulleys, levers and plungers that looked like they were purloined from da Vinci's estate sale. (He assured however that they were once Galileo's.) He began to furiously wind a large brass crank with both arms, drawing forth the hemispheres of a wooden cupola that would encase him and protect him from sunlight. That is, until the crank seized up halfway through the process.

"ACH!"

"Thirty seconds, Captain! I cannot disrupt the phase!"

He pulled on the crank with all of his undead strength, bracing his boot against the metal column. A nut shattered and the crank came off in his hands.

"NEIN!"

He tossed the dislodged crank aside and ripped the rusted lock off a battered wooden chest. He pulled out a shredded mess of dusty black canvas surrounded by a cloud of moths.

"Mein Gott..."

"Phasing NOW!"

The swirling darkness around the ship evaporated as the midday of a cloudless sky bathed the ship in the sun's brilliance. I began powering down my Galvanic Tesseractor. I was suddenly distracted by an unexpected display of shimmering light from the cupola.

"Captain? You're...SPARKLING?!?"

With a weary and stoic expression he rubbed his pale cheek with a tattered glove. "Ja, das is vant to happen just before I..."

Before he could finish his sentence he exploded in a gout of flame.

"CAPTAIN!!!"

The primary airbag above the ship, only barely repaired during the cross-time transit, immediately disintegrated. The cables that held the balloon stretched upwards with vestigal scraps of canvas like impromptu flagpoles, indicating we had immediately begun to plummet. I only noticed the gaping hole in the deck from the explosion when an ebony-and-scarlet furred neko floated helplessly upwards from it, flailing his limbs and staring back at me with crimson eyes in shock and terror.

At the same time in the dark place known as Lost Angels the androids Nova and Six were pulled into a vortex of time and energy. The cross-time tear opened a rift into their world and pulled them in, disrupting their physical shells and memories.

Nova's short interlude as Qli-2 allowed her to retain some memory of the Bloodwing family and its many relations, but her old powers and possessions were stripped from her as the many-fold realties played havoc with her systems.

One moment she was a human girl in a far away land, the next an elf warrior serving her Queen, still in another a mechanical swordmistress beloved of a minotaur. All of the realms of possibility and timelines changed and warped her until at last she was drawn into Seraph City and part of the team: Nova and Six's Salvage.

Six tumbled through the vortex, time tearing at her like the claws of a raging beast. Years ago some deviant had modifed her, by shoe-horning the pleasure/pain center of a succubus's brain into her systems as an experiment to make her a better pleasure model. This had grown and became a soul inhabiting Six's chassis. That was now ripped from her and cast out into the endless seas of time. Nothing had prepared Six for the vortex or time shifts or the shock of losing an integral system part. Her electronic eyes flickered wildy then went black as she entered a failsafe mode shutting her down until repairs could be made, and time became her repairman...

Six awoke in a junkyard looking down at the spanner she had dropped. She swore under her breath and looked back to find Nova had just wound her key again " I can not complete my work while constantly needing to be wound!" She reached down for the spanner going back to work on a small airship she had built specially to salvage and tow larger air ships.

Nova looked up to see the Revenge plummeting towards the bay and yelled for Six to, "Crank her up and lets go save that ship!"

Both droids, changed in appearance, function and indeed reality itself soared towards the Revenge and quickly looped their towing lines around the ship. A great shuddering of gears and a few curses from Nova later, and the "Sixes and Sevens" (named after each girl's unit numbers) pulled the Revenge out of its nosedive and brought it safely to rest on the tarmac.

the space between times

A lateral jump out of the Hive fleet was out of the question, and we knew it. Not with a hellgate that large and so close. We could have easily emerged on the wrong side. At the absolute worst, we could have caught on the portal boundary and ripped it wider in our wake.

Koen was right. A forward jump was our only chance. And now this entire clockwork ship is sailing through the torrents of time. Somehow, Koen knew our powers combined could make this happen. I have retrofitted myself to the ship's helm like a living masthead. For all intents and purposes, this ship is now a TARDIS, with myself as its core. Koen's alchemy is shielding us from the energies swirling around us, and he is using the Time Window technology our vampiric captain pioneered to navigate us to a city outside the Age of Steam.

I can hear Aleister cursing at Koen for shredding his carpet in shrill squeaks while he nails copper plates over the holes the Hive ripped out of the hull. He is clinging to underside of the ship in his giant bat form, wings stretched over the hull for support while while he hammers away with digigrade claws.

I have never stopped to admire the beauty of the vastness of hypertime while tesseracting alone. Certainly not when Nova and I were holding onto each other for...

Of course! I'm activating a homing beacon to the frequency only my sister Qli-2 shared. She vanished without a trace during the Pogrom. She must have escaped to hypertime.

Qli-2? Sister? Are you there? Did you find a safe place? Did you find your way back to your homeline as Nova? We have regrouped. Things are not the same. But we are strong again.

We would miss you for the trials ahead. Follow this beacon to our ship if you can. Or meet us in Seraph City. Or just give a sign you still exist.

Qli...Qlippothic Prime signing off. Message set to repeat.

the swarm

I could have dispatched the wasp-creatures myself, but the steering mechanism for the Bloodwing's Revenge was so dilapidated that I linked my nervous system directly into the ship to handle the navigation entirely by myself. If I disengaged, the hundreds of gears connected to chart our course would spin out of control. It would take me weeks to recalibrate while floating helplessly at the cloud level.

"YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL AIRSHIP TREATIES! DISEMBARK IMMEDIATELY!", I thundered in my most authoritative tone. I am not sure that they understood human speech, but the amplification of my warning and the glare of my arc-light only served to anger them. They advanced towards me, their wings droning menacingly as they drew their revolvers.

"QLIPPOTHIC! LIGHTS OFF!", shouted Aleister from below deck. I complied, shutting my cranial aperture and surrendering the deck to the absolute darkness of night inside thick enveloping clouds. Perhaps it would be better if I did not see my own demise and and that of the rest of the crew.

I glimpsed the pale blue sparks of enchanted rapiers slicing between an invader's segments. Aleister's fanged scowl hovered in my optic sensors between the split seconds that the cloak of the cloud's total darkness again descended upon the deck. A panicked shot from a wasp-revolver deflected off my shoulder harmlessly.

He seemed to be everywhere at once. There were so many flashes of light that the battle unfolded like a flipping roll of pictures inside a penny-arcade booth. Aleister was soon surrounded by dozen of the wasps, each lunging and slicing the air with four arms clutching straight blades in their talons as long and as sharp as the stingers glistening with venom that curled forward from their abdomens.

"GET OFF MY SHIP!"

In rapid succession the wasp blades - and the chitinous arms clutching them - fell clattering to the deck. Severed sheets of gauzy wings caught their last fight in the airship's wake and vanished. The drones of the wasps with their abdomens slashed open were louder and even more unsettling as they spent in a last series of bitter clicks choking from their bloody mandibles.

Aleister flipped up the shield on a gas lantern built into the deck. He surveyed the carnage of a score of the beasts mangled and twitching in pieces, oozing black liquid across the boards. The vampire examined the tarry substance stretching across his off-hand sword, flaring his nostrils in mild disgust.

"Zis...zis ist ichor. Zey are from der untervurld."

A brass periscope bounced upwards from behind the speaking horn that arched over the ship's wheel. I spun my head forwards again in alarm to see the slitted cornea of Koen's red eye staring back at me through the fishbowl-shaped lens. The universal joint craned past me down at the corpses, and judging from the erratic turns of the lens, Koen was twitching excitedly.

"Their equipment is uniform and customized to their species", I noted as I looked down at a wasp revolver from where it skidded to rest by my ankle. It was little more than a hexagonical puzzle-tube of steel, obviously mass-produced by a race fixated on utility and with no concept of a comfortable grip, since it was of course perfectly designed an exoskeletal claw. "Decidedly not a hodgepdge of human pirates' tools."

"Und zey reek of sulphur...just arrived...zere ist a Hellgate near here!"

The vampire was correct. Even through the freezing winds I could now detect the highly elevated levels sulphur in the atmosphere.

"A hellgate in the middle of a cloud?" chirped Koen. "Don't you need a cave for that?"

"Qlippothic. Climb over der cloud cover."

"Aye, Captain."

I heard a clatter from below deck as I altered course and the periscope dropped. A second later I heard a scrambling of claws and the periscope hopped up again. "Guys..." interrupted Koen as the redundant wheel of the ship leaned towards me on its own accord. "These insects look like Vesprium soldiers, they come from the Great Hive that borders Erebus. But they've never been known to stray from the..." As we broke through the roof of the clouds, the periscope unexpectedly jerked upwards, swerving about unevenly as it scanned the skies. The blanket of stars and the bright artery of the Milky way coated the deck in soft light. Koen's utterance of "Oh...shit..." was barely heard under the deafening buzz.

We erupted from the clouds in the middle of throng of airships, each one dwarfing the Bloodwing's Revenge in size, suspended from hive-shaped balloons, all pointed westward in tight formation. Their courses could be traced back to the hovering red disc burning angrily in the night sky. Even as we watched, another pair of Vesprium ships passed through the portal from the skies of Hell into our own space.

Captain Aleister broke the silence. "Zis ist no pirate's armada, mein kinder...ist an invasion fleet..."

a hive of scum and villainy

I manned the wheel at the helm of the old skyship at the evening shift. Each time the Bloodwing's Revenge skimmed through a heavy cloud that reduced my visibility to the wheel, it left a sheen of ice on my metallic frame that quickly evaporated from the heat of my internal combustion. A garish brass horn curved over the wheel for the convenience of barking orders below deck, or in Aleister's case give orders to the pilot during daylight hours. I can understand the life of a vampire being a lonely one, but I already had my share of his rambling when I was his thrall.

"...und I must say, Herrin Qlippothic, you are handlink der gallon very vell. Vere did you learn such tings?"

"One of the most fearsome pirates of this age taught me how to handle a ship, Captain..."

I could hear a bit of my pride showing through. Before I met Captain Bohemia I was afraid to even go near the water.

"...and it was easy enough to carry that knowledge to airships. I flew many of sorties of CIRRUS Fire Brigade dirigibles for Caledon."

Indeed, I was used to having an air balloon looming over me as I navigated. Though I never would have used a canvas this vessel used, which was in such dilapidated condition I was amazed it held air at all.

In a fit of nostalgia I accessed my memories of Midnight. She taught me the name of every rope and sail. Leather gloves pressed my brass hands to the spokes of the wheel. Hard to port...Starboard...

I shook my head. Something else was making a wrong noise on the ship. "Captain Aleister? Why are the propellers buzzing so loudly? Do we need more oil?"

"Vas? The propellers are off! Ve are sailink on a strong vind!"

"Then what..."

I heard several sets of legs land on deck behind me. I rotated my head fully and opened the chamber in my forehead, letting my Sephiroth illuminate the fog.

Several human-sized bipedial insects flinched as I blinded them. Their chitin were black and yellow. Their double-sets of wings jutted from their backs like blades in an intimidating X. They wore only leather harnesses, from which they drew their straight blades and pistols...

there's no telling just now what we have in store

Qlippothic lay in the table for weeks as his father and his gas-fueles urchin toiled day and not upon rows of machinery. She had tried to reason with him, to tell him his theories were not sufficiently tested. That the results could not be controlled. For this he immobilized her. For daring to try to contact outsiders for help, he had disconnected her voice.

Even though she had free will, she had never defied her creators, save when the fate of the Earth itself was at stake. Now, she was beginning to regret her obedience.

"Qli? You awake?"

[[AUDIO: YOUNG MALE NEKO. ACCENT NEW BABBAGE URCHIN HIGH STEELHEAD TRACE- CONSISTENT. TONE OF FAMILIARITY - CONSISTENT. AGE - INCONSISTENT. IDENTITY INCONCLUSIVE.]]

The scruffy urchin's face leaned over, into her field of vision

[[VISUAL: YOUNG MALE SPECIES NEKO. EYES CRIMSON FELINE - CONSISTENT. FACIAL FUR NONE - INCONSISTENT (Developmental?) FACIAL: 80% (ADJUST FOR DEVELOPMENT) WHISKER PATTERN - CONSISTENT. EAR PATTERN BLACK WITH RED TIPS - BLOODTAIL CONFIRMED. TAIL UNSEEN. IDENTITY CONFIRM: 75%?]]

"Can ya hear me Qli? Flash your eyes again or somethin' Hun!."

[[ACCENT TRACE BALTIMORE VIA FATHER ID 80% - PREVIOUS ROOF INTERLOPER CONFIRMED THROUGH ADMISSION TRESSPASSING BEHAVIOR: CONSISTENT ID 85% - ACKNOWLEDGING COMMUNICATIONS.]]

"Great! Listen, I don't know how to fix you, but I know someone who can. We were gonna break in and bust you out later, but since Dad and his walking oven kid are out of town..."

[[WE...?]]

"...we're busting you outta here before he breaks you and blows up the whole city. No, really. You can thank me later."

He drew a knife of dull grey metal from his boot and began cutting the cables linking her to the machinery in a shower of sparks. Qli's eyes began to pulse furiously in Morse Code to chastise him.

"Not listening!"

The boy stood over Qli's table and waved his arms upwards. A black box on a cable lowered with a crash, sounding the alarm systems of the Consulate.

The neko tugged at the sides of the box that fell beside them until it began to unfold by itself into a spider-like machine that leaped onto her table and braced it securely.

[[CLANK CONSTRUCTION: WROUGHT IRON. DESIGN: ANTIQUATED]]

The boy in turn hopped onto the iron construct and held fast to the cable as it spooled upwards, lifting him and Qlippothic.

[[TAIL PATTERN CONSISTENT: ID 95%. CLANK IDENTIFIED: EARLY DESIGN SKYSHIP CLAW - CUSTOM DESIGN]]

From her vantage point, she could see the wooden hull of the airship looming larger as the sky slowly rotated.

[[SHIP ID CONFIRMED: BLOODWING'S REVENGE. LAST KNOWN OWNER: ALEISTER MASON. CHANCE OF MISFORTUNE ON CURRENT MISSION: 100%]]

a stranger here reborn it seems

It was a simple matter for Aleister to install my second eye. He avoided answering my questions about his past as he stretched a dermal layer across my face and fastened it down.

When I asked him where this workshop was located, he only said "a forgotten place."

He lifted my head in his hands and carried me gently to another table. My face was pointed upwards, and I felt a pressure under my base. The was a snap followed by a cascade of clicks. Renewed sensations of a physical form joyously greeted my longing receptors. Peering down at me, his pale, thin-lipped smile mirrored my own. "Und now you haff a body again." He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and pulled my torso up to a sitting position. I was suspended silently against the threadbare ruffles and brass buttons of his jerkin. He felt as cold as I was, but he smelled of machine oil and polished wood, and a trace of that wonderful vintage that made my palate tingle just at the thought of it.

One hand left my shoulder. I felt the rod extending into my back when he gripped the key. His fingers I still felt cued me not to tense my shoulder blades when I felt the rod rotating in slow intervals. I felt my energy building with each series of ratcheting turns. My hands...my small synthetic hands that seemed to mimic both hard porcelain and human skin when needed for flexible joints, raised gently to reach as best they could around his sides.

He stepped back, supporting me by my upper arms and slid back to my hands as I proved I retained balance. His delicate fingertips brushed mine as he withdrew a step.

"Step down, und valk."

I turned to look behind me for a moment, The table had a square latch in the center where an open panel hinged down, allowing me to lie on my back with the key in place. My knees trembled when my bare feet pressed down on the cold wooden planks. Over the meager protest of my ankles and hip joints, I straightened my posture. I looked up to him, fangs exposed as he grinned and nodded almost imperceptibly in approval. He was very tall...twice my size. Or was it...I was the one who was small.

He gestured with a ruffled sleeve towards a full-length standing mirror in the corner of the workshop. With one hesitant step after another I stood before the mirror. I saw my own face, white as porcelain with painted makeup...at first I thought I looked like the Founder's visage of the Dragon, but then I recognized it as the pattern adorn a child's doll. My eyes were a deep green. My black hair was cut short, above the neckline. (I remembered from my first incarnation that getting one's hair caught in one's own machinery was never a good idea.) It desperately needed to be styled.

I scanned lower to what Aleister had wrapped my new body in. I wore a ruffled black and maroon dress with matching gloves. The color scheme which immediately reminded me of what was now my favorite food, and favorite color. My delicate feet were bare.

"Do you like it?" I turned my head to gaze back at him as he broke my distraction. "Ze hair und ze shoes..." he shrugged. "I cannot keep up vit two hundred years of fashion. I vill brink you a catalog."

I ran to him, and he knelt to accept my embrace. "Vat is your name now?" I stepped back, hinged eyelids blinking.

"My name is Qli..." I shook my head. It just didn't seem to fit me anymore. I tried to imagine myself as a taller construct, but all I saw was my sister in the modifications she made to my old form. "I...I need a new name."

"Close your eyes" he said, "tell me vat you feel."

I explored the darkness. I felt the hundreds of gears and miles of springs, and envisioned them. Neither of my first Creators ever built something this dazzlingly coomplex and beautiful...it must have taken a century to draft this clockwork geometry...

"Geomet..." My lips processed a responce. "Gem...Gematria!" The vampire smiled.

"Vunderbar! A perfect name! Und now, Gematria, you vill serve me as your new Creator."

There was a slight pang of regret as I nodded. He noticed my expression.

"Ze Founder is gone, mein daughter. Zere is only one of ze bloodline older than me. But ze Firstborn is defiant, and vill ,nezer take ze role as ze new Founder." I whispered the name of the being he referred to that had ever so briefly been reborn as my brother.

"Vortex..."

"Und after him, I am ze oldest...surviving...member of ze Mason line."

My eyes widened as his placid demeanor parted like the clouds to reveal the burning desire beneath.

"I AM ZE NEW FOUNDER!!" He roared with fangs bared.

I took several paces back until my key made contact with the table. I responded with a supplicative "Yes, Sir" as his bloodshot gaze turned back to me.

"After you pick out your shoes," said Aleister, "you vill return to Doctor Mason. You shall say nussink of zis. You vill be summoned vhen ze time is right."

He advanced upon me again, and ran his fingers through my hair as he looked down.

"Follow my directions...und you vill be a Princess of Hell...just as he promised you..."

FIN