"Cut away falsehood. Rip out the Light. And carve it anew" it whispered over and over again. "With no Gardener to interfere, a Final Shape yet looms"
"The Gardener's tools will shatter you upon your Final Shape, as they did once before" I vowed, smashing several Pyramids on the way to it's capital ship, the Macrocosm. Our powers clashed, and I knew at once it had waited for this moment.
"So many felled by your hand. Stand before their judgement" it intoned. With a wave of it's hand, a Taken Observer loomed out of the Ascendant Plane. Indifferent even in death, it's killing gaze swept over millennia of adaptations; as I flung before it's gaze to give my children time to adapt, the Witness atomised me billions and billions of times. My reformation delayed, it seized the Light spilling from me and began to shape-
-and the shape unravelled.
It's brow furrowed. My children had obtained the adaptations I'd manifested and were killing the Observer quickly, eating the Dark, eating the path for it back into the living world. The Witness seized Light and Darkness again-
-the shape unravelled.
"Impossible"
"The Final Shape itself rejects you. You had your chance, and were cut apart instead" sang a golden, harmonious voice that suddenly manifested as yet another inexplicably feminine form between us. The Witness looked like it was about to spout a monologue about the first season in Destiny Rising. It looked like it was going to preach about the inevitability of finality and explain just who'd opened the gate for the Collapsals. But upon seeing the incarnation of it's own work preventing it's own completion, it let loose a scream of rage that shattered the new false sky, gripped my inchoate form in it's fists, drew forth a black sun in it's fist-
-and said "You choose the Gardener over OUR knife again?! SO BE IT. What was unmade, can be MADE ANEW! As you gouged the Winnower...SO WE CAN PLANT IT IN A NEW VESSEL"
Hands reached out from me again.
Even perceived from higher dimensional viewpoints, they converged.
At the Witness' gesture, the garden the was not the Black Garden opened up between us, the faceless and long-dead girl stood between us.
And the Winnower, born anew, looked at me through her with an joy to test and iterate that was axiomatic with jilted rage.
"Go on, little god. Reclaim your weapon as you once clutched me" entreated the Witness.
I was held.
FAST.
Strand. Stasis. More aspects, the Witness gleefully severing the very concepts of fate. It's monomania, I thought, would be it's undoing. My calculations extended to expositing and shifting various forces below upon the Black Fleet, sabotaging it from within-in the long term, taking it's technology for Terra's own benefit.
As Darkness threatened to strangle me, the counterplay I'd also calculated my avatar to own in his backstory entered.
"Ah, gomen gomen, Oracle-san!" yelled a small girl-shaped patch of darkness, smashing through reality and tripping over with a sandwich in her mouth. "I'm late again, kyaaaa~"
"What" said the Witness, as I started thrashing my way out. Originium, I realised, was something the Witness wasn't as familiar with as paracausality.
"I'm Doctor's most reliable friend in every timeline where he doesn't have his memories lost and meets Amiya thatluckyslut, Alice!" declared the vaguely girl-shaped gaping wound in reality. "In the name of peace and cooperation between the races of Terra, I'll punish you!"
"This is ridiculous. You are but the husk of a long-dead child, a wound charged with war!" ranted the Witness, grabbing me and trying to freeze me in a transcendental equation. I started forcing Light-infused Originium down it's orifices instead. "You stand before the truth carved in the image of your death! The very principle of competition and simplicity itself! The one who even in death, rules this...Winnower, what are you doing? Winnower?" it gurfled.
"Fusion-haaaaa!" yelled Alice, headbutting the Winnower. Collapsals being what they were, their heads kinda...fused together. Elsewhere, the Witness was manifesting Sword Logic but even my punitive adaptations to the Observers' gaze were proving difficult for it to perforate.
"Alright, Alright, that's enough stress testing" it said, staring at me as I parried the Witness' wild swing and detonated a Prismatic-infused Originium dyson sphere in it's chest cavity. Gaps in reality appeared, through which my children were smashing the Black Fleet in their coils even as blasts of Resonance cut them apart, or devouring Disciples who gouged at them every inch swallowed down their throats. "Had to make sure you didn't go soft in this world! You had me worried with that Rhode Island nonsense. But you pass again""
"No! NO! STOP THAT! Get back here and fight me this INSTANT!" I shouted at it. "I REFUSE to induct you into Rhode Island!"
"Yes, LISTEN to my baffling ideological opponent!" yelled the Witness, tearing itself apart to escape my pummelling. "He wishes to overturn everything you stand for!"
"Oh NO" it breathed, forcing itself the rest of the way down Alice's float, "I'm being convinced by your idealistic worldview and the threat of superior force of arms, as well as being literally subsumed by this other character! I'm being pacified and mending my relationshiiiiiiiiip with yoooooou" it yelled. "Also, didn't you tell Calus to blow up my home?" it added.
"Who?" muttered the Witness.
"I DO NOT CONSENT TO ROLLING YOU! GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY TEAM ROSTER RIGHT NOW! I'LL BURN YOU FOR GACHA MATERIALS" I started screaming in cosmically applicable linguistics.
I backhanded the battered Witness out of the way as I tried to force open Alice's jaws to spit out the Winnower. But it was too late. It was stuck in there. Realising suddenly I had more ways of enacting final death than just through Prismatic, the Witness beat a hasty retreat, escaping to another timeline as I struggled and struggled until I grumpily returned to lead yet another damn peace council after ensuring the Winnower was STUCK inside the eldritch kouhai my naive avatar had apparently made trying to save a dead girl from being a Collapsal. This time with an ancient enemy once again caged inside two dead girls.[Expand Post]
"Hi, you must be Amiya! You sure look alive and not destroying the world my man died trying to save in a wave of Originium!" said Alice cheerfully while I started the meeting by asking Theresis if he had any spare Tylenol.
"Oh, are you another friend of the Doctor? Or um, the Oracle now? I hope we can all reach an understanding, no matter how..." Amiya stared at the wound in reality nervously "...different, we all are?"
Still smiling, Alice leaned in and whispered "Don't fuck this up or I'll gut you like a fish". Then her eyes rolled up in her skull and, carefully turning her back on the crowd, she peeled off her face to reveal the Winnower grinning behind it. "It's cool, the dead girl's the jealous one. I like to watch" it whispered at Amiya as she backed away nervously.
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