Beginning 6

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While they were all here, the liaison, who also came to help deal with updating the trans-dimensional technology, has been telling me about all the changes I need to make to my lifestyle. Which happened while we sat around eating grilled pork chops, baked beans, salad, and grilled asparagus. I had called up some super plumbers in town to go about installing extra toilets for the occasion. To my knowledge, neither of them could change sizes or throw fireballs.

“If you want to communicate interdimensionally, we can try to get you set up with a method that won’t damage the fabric of reality,” Mystic Teneceroni told me.

“Who would want to read something you wrote anyway?” Miss Tycism asked.

I shrugged. “They’re probably getting tired of me.”

“I read it,” Sam added. “It started off a lot darker, like Garth Ennis. Cruel dark humor.”

“I once got compared to The Boys,” I said.

“Wonder if it’s because you fucking killed me,” Miss Tycism added.

I shrugged. “Safe to say I’ve had some very negative thoughts about the usefulness of superheroes. But you probably didn’t deserve it as much as I thought.”

“Do we really need to keep her alive?” Miss Tycism asked Teneceroni.

“I’m with her,” Captain Lightning II said.

“I don’t know how your system of justice works,” Mystic Teneceroni explained. “But if you fail, your world will be consumed by some manor of conceptual horror and risk the rest of the solar system, galaxy, and universe unless we cauterize the wound your world used to belong to. Since I’m on this water-covered rock with you, I advise you to suck it up until after this is over. There aren’t many left.”

“Wait, there’s a finite number? And you know how many there are?” I asked.

“Three more,” Teneceroni said. “We’ve never found a way to outright stop the last one. No matter what, no matter what problems it might cause, we have to seal the rifts before the End arrives.”

“Tell me about this End,” I said. Sam came up and put her arms around me. Morgan, the magic hero called Axinomancer, adjusted her lawn chair to be closer to mine. Meanwhile, Max Muscles was trying to impress everyone by putting up a temporary fabric awning.

“Technically, its process has already begun, but it accelerates when the others have come through already. I suppose in their own way, they all are part of the process,” Teneceroni explained. “It involves dark energy, specifically something your people call phantom energy.”

Before we could get too far into a conversation designed to melt my brain out of my ears, I noticed the awning Max put up seemed quite a bit taller than it should have been. And not like someone made a mistake, more like why would anyone create a small, two-story awning for the backyard. Looking back down, I had to shake my head because everything looked off.

Distantly, I saw Captain Lightning throw his food away and ask indignantly, “What did you put in the food? Did you drug us?”

I tried to answer, but he was moving away. Everything was moving away. My backyard stretched on for miles at least. I now sat in a vast never-ending grassland with no shade, no cover, and no clouds. I pulled out my phone. And no bars.

A change in the light drew my attention back to the sky, that little trapped bit of atmosphere that eventually faded into the void of space. The moon now hung high in it, pulling closer. I watched ad it went from a distant celestial object to filling the entire sky, giving the naked eye a detailed view of craters pockmarking its surface. I could even see various moonbases, some left behind by countries, others by supers. I swear I could even make up the abandoned cheese factory where they used to make moon cheese. The shipping and handling was bullshit.

A darkness spread over the surface of the moon. In the darkness were glittering lights from stars and distant galaxies. The mass split into three long bands around the moon, like fingers. The moon was moved out of the way and there was a face made of the same void, with dark empty impressions where the eyes would be.

“I take it-” I started, then stood up and cupped my hands around my mouth. “I take it you’re here to surrender?!”

This big thing opened its mouth to reveal teeth of blazing light as it laughed, the Earth trembling. When it spoke, I didn’t so much hear it as feel it. “”I. Am. The. Vast.”

“Say it, don’t spray it, you vastard,” I remarked.

“You unleashed more than you ever could have comprehended, childish thing,” the Vast retorted.

“Why don’t you come down here to my level and say that, big guy?” I pointed at the grass right in front of me. Then I pulled out my phone and opened a remote wormhole link to my interdimensional base. It’s held together by wormholes, which isn’t helping things overall. But now, it could be the key to beating this asshole.

Sure, the whole gang of mages could probably just suck this guy into a rock or something, but the Vast put a wrench into that. None of the group are around. Even Sam and Morgan went from invading my personal space to being out of sight. And even if I had my powers, I could have implemented this pretty easily. I was worried he’d just splat me flat but I guess he was drawing time apart as well.

Power-wise, there were no restrictions for me to make more wormholes: I’ve been harnessing direct star power. And while it would be environmentally friendly to have Tom Cruise use an exercise bike to make my equipment work, I meant wormholes that open directly into the hearts of stars. Which is great for power, but I have to do it elsewhere due to the gravity issues.

I also activated the redundant wormhole devices. All of them. I keep plenty of them around because shit can go wrong. So without power being an issue, I just had to make as many wormholes as possible: wormholes in stars, wormholes in gravitational singularities, wormholes in black holes. Most importantly, I opened wormholes in The Vast, which I was able to do thanks to the advances space-time targeting system of the wormholes made possible by the very technology that allows them to punch holes in the universe.

Sometimes, I’m really glad I broke into alien computers and occasionally used my omniscience, limited or not, to spy on distant galaxies in space. I was hoping to see some star wars, or perhaps some ship on a long star trek.

The Vast swung a fist at me, but it was taking forever. Perhaps I could have theoretically evaded it since it was taking minutes to land, but this is the same fist where the fingers were large enough to wrap around the moon. That’s a punch so big, it could wipe out the dinosaurs. It was taking long enough to get here, though. Meanwhile, I filled it up with every damn source of gravity I could find, all concentrating in the middle of that damn head. A shrinking head. A head that, along with its own gravity, collapsed in on itself.

The Vast being whatever the fuck it is, it didn’t die. But it sucked that whole thing into itself with what I feel was probably a tormented wail.

“What was that?” I called out. “Couldn’t quite hear that!” Meanwhile, grass moved around me, pulling in toward me. I looked and it was like the landscape was getting sucked into my feet. And thanks to the power of advanced technobabble behind the reckoning of mortal man, I brought the Vast to myself, using the wormholes to keep the gravity from leaking out and affecting me. By the time he got to me, he was marble-sized.

“Not so vast now,” I said. “Now to figure out-”

Sam’s hands wrapped around me. And Morgan’s. “Hey, watch it, y’all, I got an Ancient Horror here.”

“Where?” Captain Lightning stomped up to me. Miss Tycism and Mystic Teneceroni joined me as well, examining the little floating lattice of compressed wormholes. I was able to close most of them and shut down the redundant systems. Meanwhile, Sam grabbed my face and stole a kiss. I even let Morgan do the same, which prompted a competitive Sam to grab me and go for it again. And then Morgan again. I let Sam get one more in before I had to raise my hands.

“Stop it, please, we need to figure out how to contain this thing, especially if wer’re turning off the wormholes.” I explained what I’d experienced and done to the Vast. Captain Lightning sulked, but Miss Tycism and Teneceroni went to work immediately trying to work out a way to create the same effect without the portals. They had to call in the rest of the mages, who were already on their way from the nearby motels and AirBnBs. By the time they arrived, I was just finishing sticking the Vast inside a snowglobe I had laying around from a recent trip I took to Disney World.

“Here,” I said, tossing it over to Teneceroni. “It’s a small world, after all.”

After that whole ordeal, I could have used a break. Instead, I ran to go check on the kids. Alexander was upset, and I don’t blame him. Poor kid hasn’t known anything but the Ancient Horrors since before he was even born.

So it wasn’t until the next morning when I had time to look into the information Teneceroni gave me. Negative energy and phantom energy. I had some knowledge of all that from my time with omniscience. This solar system had elevated levels, I remember, but I never looked into it more. I knew enough to modify some of my trans-dimensional tech. I had made spares of the devices that open wormholes in case anything happened to the main ones I used.

The targeting equipment was less precise without my direct neural interface, but the point was it had an amazing ability to scan space-time, which was just what I needed. Even space was warped by a gargantuan Ancient Horror, it was able to map it to precisely target With some modifications and a little lingering goddess know-how, I fixed it to detect energy and matter that otherwise isn’t observable to beings of conventional matter and energy.

The monitor I hooked up didn’t so much show dark matter and energy around Earth as it showed Earth drenched in dark energy. The physicists are going to kick themselves when they realize it. But that’s also the issue, because this is more than I think I remember, and it’s growing. I think that’s what Teneceroni meant about the process having begun and accelerating. I don’t know if The End that he spoke of is an actual being or not, but this amount of phantom energy flooding the area so quickly is going to fuck with space-time and could cause a Big Rip with a bunch of smaller ones first. The End is coming through every wormhole on Earth, flooding it with energy that’ll tear the bonds between atoms apart. Not just between atoms, but the bonds between the parts that make up atoms.

It’s one of the ways the universe could end. It could definitely take out Earth. So I’m going to have to close the portals and cut myself off from all of y’all. So I guess this useless little blog is going to have to end.

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