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Shifting Sands: Chapter 6

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    Everyone from the wreck was dead; enemies, innocents, and heroes alike. Her mission had been completed. Her oath had been fulfilled. She was the last survivor of many terrible trials, now a genius, now a conquerer, now a time traveler, a creature and a power to be feared above all lesser life.

    She had won. ███████ had won.

    But what a terrible price it had extracted. Her soul had been cursed, and her name had been taken from her, such that even her own son could no longer love her. And she was left stranded, exiled upon the face of distant planet Earth, without any method or faintest hope of returning home.

    And so, dear readers, she found herself utterly alone, and began a life of silence and pain.

    With no purpose, and no plan, and no clear path forward to greater victories, she set off exploring.

    She used the time machine, naturally.

    So did decades of her own life stretch out over millenia of human life, as she jumped from time to time. She searched and she learned and worked and she killed through this world, all from the deepest, darkest shadows. Everything she did was veiled in secrecy; her disguises were numerous, her unwitting allies were countless, and the swelling seas of knowledge in her mind grew deeper and deeper.

    But despite the great number of humans who came to surround her and inhabit her range of manipulation, the dreaded curse hounded her. Nobody who saw her or heard her would trust her, nobody became her friend, nobody ever once showed her kindness or care or compassion. Lonely and outcast she was, a wretched creature of the night. Whenever she imitated a friend or loved one, they would sense something ‘off’, and see past the disguise. They would run from her in the forest, they would attack her on the city streets. Words and stories of a ghastly terror surrounded her murders and her actions, and she was known by names that were not her own.

    … Speaking of which, what was her name?

    She was shocked one day to realize that she couldn’t quite remember anymore. So she buried her head in her hands, and bid farewell to that last remaining shred of humanity (for lack of a better word).

    She was a person no longer. The curse had rendered her naught but a monster. Now and forever.

    And nobody else now lived who could remember her name either. And even if they could, even if somebody, anybody could say it outloud or write it down, it wouldn’t work. It would just be a noise, a funny sound, a nonsense fnord. It was less than a name, less even than a word, for words have meaning, whereas ███████ means nothing. Nothing at all. And when a noise has no meaning and no context and no depth, it becomes forgotten, passed out of memory like the useless garbage that it is.

    And that is why it has been blanked out from this story.

    What now was she to do?

    Her future was a blank slate.

    Well, no, not a blank slate, really… Not like a paper or a parchment or a document that could be written upon, but more like a rock, a slab, a hard chunk of obsidian. Something opaque and dark, a miserable little brittle something which was not only empty and formless, but at the same time impossible to change, mar, or inscribe. Her future was nothing.

    And so it came to be, after many long and miserable years of shadow, she made a new oath.

    With nothing to lose, and nothing to gain, and naught but her own wretchedness standing against the universe, she looked up into the sky and swore upon her own name that she would destroy this planet, and every flying, swimming, and crawling creature that walked upon it. And from the wreckage of the past and the future she would rise to greatness; from the highest heights of the future of medical science she would find a cure for mortality itself, from the furthest reaches of the past she would unlock the mysteries of the universe. She would become a god. And she would leave this planet behind, and she would create a new future, a better future, in that long-distant time when she returned to the stars.

    She would do it.

    She would rise up to a greatness beyond all other life. In doing so she would win the battle that was nature itself.

    And by this victory she would spit directly in the face of God. These cruel fates he beset upon her would not hold her, and she would rise, while Earth burned behind and below.

    She did not know so herself, but I can assure you that by this point, she was utterly and completely insane.

    And there was another of God’s prophets who once said. “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life…”

    She had made her choice; she had given to the universe nothing but murder and lies and cruelty, even against those who meant her no ill. So the day was coming. The day when she would reap death, when the hunter would become the hunted, when justice would have its way, and when new heroes would arise to complete her story.

    A monster’s end would surely meet her.







    And that day came.







    She was somewhere about 2050 A.D. at the time, standing near the shore of the black lake, staring at a curious inscription on a stone. It appeared to depict a time and date, as well as a strange zodiac, of much the same type that carried the prophecy of the great being’s defeat. But this one was peppered with many even stranger symobls. A buzzsaw, a spacecraft, and a crude depiction of the great eldritch being (of all things)… And then her eye caught on something else. Near the bottom… Was that an hourglass?

    It was.

    Hourglass.

    She recalled that the great being had once called her that name. And it wasn’t until much later that she’d stolen time machines that bore that symbol, and realized that she’d been brought to where she was by a strange destiny indeed…

    Hourglass.

    What did that mean? It was a clever, useful, beautiful device that was used to measure and understand time, in an era where nothing else could. Just as she had outwitted the crew, and survived and thought and understood far better than anyone around her, such was the way of the hourglass… But an hourglass is also a device which drains itself dry and then dies. It is a device that needs a keeper, needs a helper to turn it back over. It cannot work on its own, for if it does, it will surely die.

    Hourglass.

    She clicked her teeth angrily. The very name, the label, was a mockery of her own strength and self-reliance. It was a gest, a joke, a cruel pun focused directly at her, a warning that an hourglass’s end would surely meet her.

    And somehow she got the feeling that the hourglass represented her on this zodiac too.

    How strange and distasteful.

    And then, even as she stood there, it happened.





    She met them.

    It transpired with no more ceremony than a flash of lightning.

    Out of nowhere, she had to dodge a rain of bullets, duck some kind of energy blast, and kick away a grenade that had landed at her feet. It exploded in the air 3 meters from her head, and a shower of shrapnel cut into her side. She had to use the time machine about 5 times just to find a version of that first 10 seconds where she wasn’t mortally wounded.

    Now she was fighting with her hands, now cuts appeared in her arms, as if from an axe. Now a perfectly-placed blade wedged in her ribs. Now they drove her out of the trees, into the blinding sunlight and the rippling grass where there was nowhere to hide. Now she heard the roar of a jetpack, and she saw its wearer use the thrust to drive a powerful kick into the side of her head. Now as she nursed a concussion, she took the form of a frog-like creature to leap away, but they were in front of her. They were around her, they were behind her, they were everywhere, they saw her every action coming. The grass caught on fire from the lasers and the jetpacks, and began to blaze.

    She saw her attackers.

    They were clad in solid black. And it wasn’t clothing, it was armor; solid pieces of artificial exoskeletons which clanged like metal when they struck at her, and whirred like motors when they moved. For a moment she wondered if these knight-like figures were ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ returned from the dead.

    But no; ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ had been farmers; peaceful people forced to make a stand. These on the other hand… These were warriors. Warriors to match and surpass her own skill and training, wielding weapons and techniques she’d never dreamt of.

    But not just warriors either. These weren’t the hesitant, lumbering patterns of soldiers fighting an anonymous war, or of mercenaries carrying out a task for profit. No, these were determined and ferocious movements of bitter enemies, enemies who saw it as personal.

    Oh God. Despite herself, she knew exactly who these were. These are the heroes sent to slay me.

    She barely escaped that first time.







    The second time was mere months later, and they attacked her in her own home. She was more prepared that time, but came even closer to death.

    This second battle was the first time she got a good, clear look at the attackers. They were human, of that she was sure. Human adults, though she couldn’t tell the age, race, or gender past the helmets. And although they often used time travel to attack multiple times at once, so that it occasionally seemed like there were dozens of them, she saw clearly this time that there were only two.

    Only two warriors. Two humans.

    A tall one and a short one.







    The third time was years later, and this time she really was prepared. She’d searched the whole world, East to West, North to South, beginning of history to its end, for fierce and terrible forms to take. She’d found and mimicked muscle-bound cats with teeth like swords, terrible lizards with jaws that could crush a car, venomous serpents that could hypnotize prey, flying dragons spewing fire, slender demons with arms as strong as trees, giant spiders, swarming masses of muscly tentacles with no center and no organs, eldritch creatures with all-seeing eyes and claws that could reach between atoms, snapping worms that could move as fast as a cracking whip, and burrow into the skin through the smallest crack. The things humans fear; the things humans have heard about but never seen; the greatest monsters of oldest legend.

    So when the warriors once again found her, she attacked bravely. But somehow they were prepared too. The short one seemed to be intimately familiar with every single monster, know every weakness of every form. And the tall one seemed to be prepared with every weapon and tactic, and shuffled through techniques as easily as flipping channels. The warriors were communicating via radio, so she never heard their voices, only saw them moving together as one, as if the fight were a dance they’d been practicing a lifetime.

    She came out of that third fight literally smaller, having lost entire sections of her body mass when she was attacked while changing forms. She was dizzy from loss of blood. Half her body was numb from missing nerves. She could barely keep her bones solid enough to stand. She felt as weak as a newborn, and she’d accomplished nothing but surviving for one more day.

    The heroes are going to win.







    The fourth time, she used every single technique her time machine could ever offer. She was before them, she was after them. She surrounded them, she was in their midst, there were dozens of her. She knew their every move ahead of time, mapped and planned out the fight before and after, scouted and watched and memorized every detail. She studied them until she could mimic them to a fault, until she knew them better than they knew themselves.

    But even that was no use, for they were either familiar with these tactics, or simply fated to win. She couldn’t trap them in an unstable paradox or a loop, she couldn’t form a bootstrap paradox against them.

    They beat her at her own game. And she knew then and there that God was the God of time. He would not be beaten at his own game, and neither would the heroes he had chosen to punish her.







    The fifth time was different, however.

    The fifth time, she stayed in the shadows. She did not wait for them to seek her out. Rather, she sought them out. That is, she searched for their time and place of origin, in order to kill them as children or newborns, before they could ever grow up to be themselves.

    She started with the only concrete thing she knew about them: their combat suits. The armor utilized time-technology of the 20ꓶ1st century, the era of The Baby’s rule.

    So that’s just where she went.

    She had to be exceptionally careful in those times, for most time-citizens were registered and tagged by their cyborg components, and the local law enforcement was well-equipped for dealing with time-traveling non-humans, so she could be caught easily. But nonetheless she survived and eluded the law, eventually managing to infiltrate gangs and form ties in the black market. After nearly a month of chasing rumors and whispers, she found what she was looking for: a missing shipment of military-grade time-tech that the time-rebellion had stolen.

    The time-rebellion. A ragtag group of men and women who operated in utmost secrecy, set on liberating the world from The Baby’s rule. Some of their members were said to have never been time-citizens at all, but were merely those who decided to stand up against injustice in a faraway land, recruited from all corners of time and space.

    She found their camp, and she sat and she watched, and finally she spied her two enemies, strolling out of a tent, examining their newly-acquired armor.

    She leapt out of hiding, and fought them for the first time. That is to say, she had fought them like this before, but they had never engaged her, at least not like this.

    The element of surprise allowed her to get the best of their inexperience. They didn’t have their tactics down quite as well as they could, didn’t know what to expect, weren’t familiar with all her forms, and, of course, they had never operated the armor before. After a brief melee, she was able to disable the short one’s jetpack and toss him into the trees, so that she could tackle the tall one, and shove her fingers beneath that helmet.

    The seals cracked, a linkage snapped, and the helmet flew off.

    Red hair unfurled around the freckled face of a 30-year-old human woman.

    “WENDY! GET OUT OF THERE!” Hollered the short one.

    The tall one fired her jetpack, and flew out of harm’s way, letting out a savage kick and returning a burst from her machine gun as she did.

    ███████ ducked to the side, activated her time machine, and fled backward through time as rapidly as she could. And as she fled, she smiled, for she’d gotten what she’d come for:

    A name and a language.

    Wendy. English.







    With a little research, she found that the name ‘Wendy’ is an English name, quite rare until it was popularized in 1911 by the book ‘Peter Pan’. It dwindled in popularity during the 21st century, until it was all-but unused and archaic by the 22nd. And the accent of the short warrior specified a country and region.

    Western America from 1910 to 2180 was her search range, and she scoured it high and low.

    It turns out that she didn’t have to scour far; in fact, it turns out that this entire time, the troublesome heroes were from Gravity Falls; the small town which had sprung up a few miles West of the crash site. And this entire time, they were the relatives of Stanford Pines. They were among the enemies of her son.

    Their names were Dipper Pines and Wendy Corduroy, and she watched them and their family singlehandedly thwart an extradimensional invasion by the great being, in the year 2012.

    She wanted to kill them at earliest convenience, but she paused, for open combat had never worked before… Perhaps she herself was fated to be beaten by them. Perhaps destiny would not allow her victory… But her son, on the other hand… Perhaps fate would allow her son to kill them.

    So she went to find him.

    And she found him. Trapped, and sealed away like some pathetic animal, locked in a tube of glass much like the one she’d spent so many years of her own life within. But unlike her, her son had no plans. He had no hope, he had no courage and no dream, and nothing at all to hang onto except his pain… He was weak. He was pathetic. He was a failure.

    As she pressed the control to thaw him, she remarked. “You were made for so much more…”

    Then she made her way back down to her original lair, and waited for him to find her.

    She waited for a week and a day.







    Eventually he found her. And she gave him a time machine. She bid him end his enemies, and so he went and he killed Dipper Pines. And as for her, she found herself face-to-face with the other. Wendy Corduroy, the girl who might one day have become the woman Wendy Pines. One of those heroes of destiny, one of those chosen few, one of those fearless, indestructible warriors. And so ███████ tortured her with a passion and a hatred, and she dug into the depths of the girl’s mind, trying to find where such strength and destiny had come from, longing to know the secret of how this girl had received fate’s blessing. Why have you found peace and happiness and greatness, when all I’ve found is pain?!?

    It was a silly question, really. And she never did receive an adequate answer.

    Instead…

    Instead she awoke the previous morning, with no memory of the events that had transpired, no clue, no hint that anything had ever gone according to plan, nothing but a faint stinging pain in her right eye, and a powerful sense of déjà vu, an impossible and vague knowledge that somehow, she had failed. Somehow, the heroes had won again.

    And instead of two time machines, now she only had one.







    In a rage she stormed out of her lair, and took the form of a fierce winged creature, swooping out of the ship and over the treetops in a blaze of fire, flying SouthEast. Back to the strange zodiac symbol where she’d first met these warriors. Back to the black lake. Back to where it all began.

    THEY must have written this! She thought, as she landed next to the symbols. They must have drawn this for ME! They want me to find them!

    So she furiously jumped backwards to the date that had been written beneath it. Then, finding herself at the date, she warped to the exact time, spreading her claws as she landed, in preparation for whoever and whatever she may find. It didn’t matter if they were here waiting for her at full power; she had had enough suspense, she had had enough waiting and preparation, too many years of nagging, cancerous doubt. Now, she just wanted to see how it ended. If this was the ending, then she would find out how it ends.

    But… She didn’t find at all what she’d expected.

    “Hello mother.”

    She froze, shocked to silence, and turned around.

    And she saw a thing that looked, to all appearances, like a perfectly human, middle-aged man. He was wearing a hoodie and some jeans, and he had a scruffy little black beard and a crooked nose… But the pupils of his eyes were poorly-adjusted, and he had a strange smell about him, enough small hints to leave no doubt for the claim behind his greeting.

    “Who are you…” She said.

    “Um…” He shrugged. “…My name is Sam. And… I’m your son. I accompanied them from the future to tell you-”

    “Who have you become…” She clarified, interrupting him. “And what have they done to you…”

    Sam frowned.

    “I gave you a future.” She told him, sorrow in her voice. “I gave you the fertile ground you needed to grow powerful and strong… I made you great… And what did you do with it? What have you become? A puppet of theirs, a fool, a court jester, willing to dress up as one of them, willing to wander at their direction and send their messages…?”

    “You didn’t give me a future.” He told her. “You gave me nothing… Mother, you gave me nothing at all, and you made me nothing but a monster. You are the reason they hated me and attacked me for so long… All it would have taken was a hint of generosity from you, a kind word with Stanford, a chance to let me learn to speak before I was of the dangerous age… I never needed to be the monster that you made me.”

    She stared at him, willing him, daring him to continue.

    “It took until I was thirty-three years old for Stanford to offer me grace, but offer it he did. And they tamed me and cared for me and forgave me… They took time for me. They fashioned me into a feeling creature. They gave me more for me than you ever did; fairness, dignity, and goodwill. I turn forty-eight tomorrow, and as I do, I owe more to my captors. To my ‘enemies’… Than I ever did to you… My own mother… I know you’re not too stupid to understand that… But can you really be so evil?”

    “Hmm.” She glowered. “Ha… And what now.” She scoffed. “You all wrote the wrong time on the stone, so that I would come here and talk to you first… You want to convince me. Make me ‘see reason’. ‘Turn from my evil ways’. I’ve heard this word before, a long time ago: you want me to spare my own enemies…”

    “But why are they your enemies anyway?” Sam asked her. “Because they attacked you? Because they tried to kill you first? Ha. Remember that from their perspective, you tried to kill them first… It’s a circle of violence. A circle of hate that you may entirely deserve, but which is still inherently unfair in the grand scheme of things… You hate each other because fate made you do so. But me… I myself have a legitimate quarrel with you, mother. I speak in the name of everyone you have ever hurt and lied to and ruined; I speak as your firstborn son that you abandoned to the savage wolves. I speak as your just and deserved enemy, and… Mother… I challenge you to a duel to the death.”

    She took a step toward him.

    “And.” He added. “My allies… They are nearby. You are time-surrounded. So if you use your time machine, then they will arrive and use theirs, which will be the beginning of another time fight, one they will not let you escape from, a fight you know you cannot win… So ours will be a plain and simple mortal fight. Tooth and claw and blade, one on one… The winner shall walk away, to continue their life as they will, and the loser will finally perish… Do you accept?”

    She stared into his eyes, with a hardness and a bitterness and a cruelty fashioned within her by many years of evil; a stubbornness, pride and hate that had seldom known equal in this world.

    But he met her gaze with a hardness of his own. A hardness that threatened hers, that challenged not only her person and her spirit, but every evil truth she’d built her worldview upon. He wanted her to die, not to become stronger than her, not because she was a threat to him, but because he was right, and she was wrong, and wrongness deserves death. It was a will and a determination that he had learned from heroes, and had made his own.

    “This is another kind of strength.” She mused out loud. “…Perhaps you could have been good for something after all.”

    “Perhaps I still can.”

    “No… Today you will see the morals you learned come all to naught, as you die for them.”

    “But I won’t die.” He told her. “…You will.” And his voice had a sincerity and a dread to it, that made her know he’d already seen it happen.

    She took a ready stance, and shifted into a form suitable for battle.

    He stared at her for a moment, then took on a fighting form himself.

    “I’m sorry, mother.”

    Her words caught in her throat just for a moment before they came out. She’d been expecting them to sound strong and brave and defiant, but when they finally passed her lips, they sounded… Small. “I shall not bow.” She whispered.

    And she considered it a most perplexing and tragic fate; that the one hero destined to finally, truly slay the monster would be its own bastard child.



    And so, near the shore of the black lake, on a bright and sunny June day, the story of the monster ███████ finally ended. She breathed her last while lying on the ground, her back against a wall, her eyes staring angrily up at the empty sky. And so her many enemies were allowed an end to their vigil, the multitude of innocents who died by her hand were given their justice, and the chaos she’d brought to the lonely places of this world began to heal.
    There is much more to this story, far beyond that which is recorded here. But those stories are not hers. Those are the stories of heroes, stories of courage and selflessness and love, the sorts of things which she had never known. Those stories are recorded elsewhere. For this story, all you need to know is that,
    For a time,

    There was peace.

Description
Shifting Sands: Chapter 6

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    Everyone from the wreck was dead; enemies, innocents, and heroes alike. Her mission had been completed. Her oath had been fulfilled. She was the last survivor of many terrible trials, now a genius, now a conquerer, now a time traveler, a creature and a power to be feared above all lesser life.

    She had won. ███████ had won.

    But what a terrible price it had extracted. Her soul had been cursed, and her name had been taken from her, such that even her own son could no longer love her. And she was left stranded, exiled upon the face of distant planet Earth, without any method or faintest hope of returning home.

    And so, dear readers, she found herself utterly alone, and began a life of silence and pain.

    With no purpose, and no plan, and no clear path forward to greater victories, she set off exploring.

    She used the time machine, naturally.

    So did decades of her own life stretch out over millenia of human life, as she jumped from time to time. She searched and she learned and worked and she killed through this world, all from the deepest, darkest shadows. Everything she did was veiled in secrecy; her disguises were numerous, her unwitting allies were countless, and the swelling seas of knowledge in her mind grew deeper and deeper.

    But despite the great number of humans who came to surround her and inhabit her range of manipulation, the dreaded curse hounded her. Nobody who saw her or heard her would trust her, nobody became her friend, nobody ever once showed her kindness or care or compassion. Lonely and outcast she was, a wretched creature of the night. Whenever she imitated a friend or loved one, they would sense something ‘off’, and see past the disguise. They would run from her in the forest, they would attack her on the city streets. Words and stories of a ghastly terror surrounded her murders and her actions, and she was known by names that were not her own.

    … Speaking of which, what was her name?

    She was shocked one day to realize that she couldn’t quite remember anymore. So she buried her head in her hands, and bid farewell to that last remaining shred of humanity (for lack of a better word).

    She was a person no longer. The curse had rendered her naught but a monster. Now and forever.

    And nobody else now lived who could remember her name either. And even if they could, even if somebody, anybody could say it outloud or write it down, it wouldn’t work. It would just be a noise, a funny sound, a nonsense fnord. It was less than a name, less even than a word, for words have meaning, whereas ███████ means nothing. Nothing at all. And when a noise has no meaning and no context and no depth, it becomes forgotten, passed out of memory like the useless garbage that it is.

    And that is why it has been blanked out from this story.

    What now was she to do?

    Her future was a blank slate.

    Well, no, not a blank slate, really… Not like a paper or a parchment or a document that could be written upon, but more like a rock, a slab, a hard chunk of obsidian. Something opaque and dark, a miserable little brittle something which was not only empty and formless, but at the same time impossible to change, mar, or inscribe. Her future was nothing.

    And so it came to be, after many long and miserable years of shadow, she made a new oath.

    With nothing to lose, and nothing to gain, and naught but her own wretchedness standing against the universe, she looked up into the sky and swore upon her own name that she would destroy this planet, and every flying, swimming, and crawling creature that walked upon it. And from the wreckage of the past and the future she would rise to greatness; from the highest heights of the future of medical science she would find a cure for mortality itself, from the furthest reaches of the past she would unlock the mysteries of the universe. She would become a god. And she would leave this planet behind, and she would create a new future, a better future, in that long-distant time when she returned to the stars.

    She would do it.

    She would rise up to a greatness beyond all other life. In doing so she would win the battle that was nature itself.

    And by this victory she would spit directly in the face of God. These cruel fates he beset upon her would not hold her, and she would rise, while Earth burned behind and below.

    She did not know so herself, but I can assure you that by this point, she was utterly and completely insane.

    And there was another of God’s prophets who once said. “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life…”

    She had made her choice; she had given to the universe nothing but murder and lies and cruelty, even against those who meant her no ill. So the day was coming. The day when she would reap death, when the hunter would become the hunted, when justice would have its way, and when new heroes would arise to complete her story.

    A monster’s end would surely meet her.







    And that day came.







    She was somewhere about 2050 A.D. at the time, standing near the shore of the black lake, staring at a curious inscription on a stone. It appeared to depict a time and date, as well as a strange zodiac, of much the same type that carried the prophecy of the great being’s defeat. But this one was peppered with many even stranger symobls. A buzzsaw, a spacecraft, and a crude depiction of the great eldritch being (of all things)… And then her eye caught on something else. Near the bottom… Was that an hourglass?

    It was.

    Hourglass.

    She recalled that the great being had once called her that name. And it wasn’t until much later that she’d stolen time machines that bore that symbol, and realized that she’d been brought to where she was by a strange destiny indeed…

    Hourglass.

    What did that mean? It was a clever, useful, beautiful device that was used to measure and understand time, in an era where nothing else could. Just as she had outwitted the crew, and survived and thought and understood far better than anyone around her, such was the way of the hourglass… But an hourglass is also a device which drains itself dry and then dies. It is a device that needs a keeper, needs a helper to turn it back over. It cannot work on its own, for if it does, it will surely die.

    Hourglass.

    She clicked her teeth angrily. The very name, the label, was a mockery of her own strength and self-reliance. It was a gest, a joke, a cruel pun focused directly at her, a warning that an hourglass’s end would surely meet her.

    And somehow she got the feeling that the hourglass represented her on this zodiac too.

    How strange and distasteful.

    And then, even as she stood there, it happened.





    She met them.

    It transpired with no more ceremony than a flash of lightning.

    Out of nowhere, she had to dodge a rain of bullets, duck some kind of energy blast, and kick away a grenade that had landed at her feet. It exploded in the air 3 meters from her head, and a shower of shrapnel cut into her side. She had to use the time machine about 5 times just to find a version of that first 10 seconds where she wasn’t mortally wounded.

    Now she was fighting with her hands, now cuts appeared in her arms, as if from an axe. Now a perfectly-placed blade wedged in her ribs. Now they drove her out of the trees, into the blinding sunlight and the rippling grass where there was nowhere to hide. Now she heard the roar of a jetpack, and she saw its wearer use the thrust to drive a powerful kick into the side of her head. Now as she nursed a concussion, she took the form of a frog-like creature to leap away, but they were in front of her. They were around her, they were behind her, they were everywhere, they saw her every action coming. The grass caught on fire from the lasers and the jetpacks, and began to blaze.

    She saw her attackers.

    They were clad in solid black. And it wasn’t clothing, it was armor; solid pieces of artificial exoskeletons which clanged like metal when they struck at her, and whirred like motors when they moved. For a moment she wondered if these knight-like figures were ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ returned from the dead.

    But no; ƉN::ᶌ and Ɖg@}Nᶌ had been farmers; peaceful people forced to make a stand. These on the other hand… These were warriors. Warriors to match and surpass her own skill and training, wielding weapons and techniques she’d never dreamt of.

    But not just warriors either. These weren’t the hesitant, lumbering patterns of soldiers fighting an anonymous war, or of mercenaries carrying out a task for profit. No, these were determined and ferocious movements of bitter enemies, enemies who saw it as personal.

    Oh God. Despite herself, she knew exactly who these were. These are the heroes sent to slay me.

    She barely escaped that first time.







    The second time was mere months later, and they attacked her in her own home. She was more prepared that time, but came even closer to death.

    This second battle was the first time she got a good, clear look at the attackers. They were human, of that she was sure. Human adults, though she couldn’t tell the age, race, or gender past the helmets. And although they often used time travel to attack multiple times at once, so that it occasionally seemed like there were dozens of them, she saw clearly this time that there were only two.

    Only two warriors. Two humans.

    A tall one and a short one.







    The third time was years later, and this time she really was prepared. She’d searched the whole world, East to West, North to South, beginning of history to its end, for fierce and terrible forms to take. She’d found and mimicked muscle-bound cats with teeth like swords, terrible lizards with jaws that could crush a car, venomous serpents that could hypnotize prey, flying dragons spewing fire, slender demons with arms as strong as trees, giant spiders, swarming masses of muscly tentacles with no center and no organs, eldritch creatures with all-seeing eyes and claws that could reach between atoms, snapping worms that could move as fast as a cracking whip, and burrow into the skin through the smallest crack. The things humans fear; the things humans have heard about but never seen; the greatest monsters of oldest legend.

    So when the warriors once again found her, she attacked bravely. But somehow they were prepared too. The short one seemed to be intimately familiar with every single monster, know every weakness of every form. And the tall one seemed to be prepared with every weapon and tactic, and shuffled through techniques as easily as flipping channels. The warriors were communicating via radio, so she never heard their voices, only saw them moving together as one, as if the fight were a dance they’d been practicing a lifetime.

    She came out of that third fight literally smaller, having lost entire sections of her body mass when she was attacked while changing forms. She was dizzy from loss of blood. Half her body was numb from missing nerves. She could barely keep her bones solid enough to stand. She felt as weak as a newborn, and she’d accomplished nothing but surviving for one more day.

    The heroes are going to win.







    The fourth time, she used every single technique her time machine could ever offer. She was before them, she was after them. She surrounded them, she was in their midst, there were dozens of her. She knew their every move ahead of time, mapped and planned out the fight before and after, scouted and watched and memorized every detail. She studied them until she could mimic them to a fault, until she knew them better than they knew themselves.

    But even that was no use, for they were either familiar with these tactics, or simply fated to win. She couldn’t trap them in an unstable paradox or a loop, she couldn’t form a bootstrap paradox against them.

    They beat her at her own game. And she knew then and there that God was the God of time. He would not be beaten at his own game, and neither would the heroes he had chosen to punish her.







    The fifth time was different, however.

    The fifth time, she stayed in the shadows. She did not wait for them to seek her out. Rather, she sought them out. That is, she searched for their time and place of origin, in order to kill them as children or newborns, before they could ever grow up to be themselves.

    She started with the only concrete thing she knew about them: their combat suits. The armor utilized time-technology of the 20ꓶ1st century, the era of The Baby’s rule.

    So that’s just where she went.

    She had to be exceptionally careful in those times, for most time-citizens were registered and tagged by their cyborg components, and the local law enforcement was well-equipped for dealing with time-traveling non-humans, so she could be caught easily. But nonetheless she survived and eluded the law, eventually managing to infiltrate gangs and form ties in the black market. After nearly a month of chasing rumors and whispers, she found what she was looking for: a missing shipment of military-grade time-tech that the time-rebellion had stolen.

    The time-rebellion. A ragtag group of men and women who operated in utmost secrecy, set on liberating the world from The Baby’s rule. Some of their members were said to have never been time-citizens at all, but were merely those who decided to stand up against injustice in a faraway land, recruited from all corners of time and space.

    She found their camp, and she sat and she watched, and finally she spied her two enemies, strolling out of a tent, examining their newly-acquired armor.

    She leapt out of hiding, and fought them for the first time. That is to say, she had fought them like this before, but they had never engaged her, at least not like this.

    The element of surprise allowed her to get the best of their inexperience. They didn’t have their tactics down quite as well as they could, didn’t know what to expect, weren’t familiar with all her forms, and, of course, they had never operated the armor before. After a brief melee, she was able to disable the short one’s jetpack and toss him into the trees, so that she could tackle the tall one, and shove her fingers beneath that helmet.

    The seals cracked, a linkage snapped, and the helmet flew off.

    Red hair unfurled around the freckled face of a 30-year-old human woman.

    “WENDY! GET OUT OF THERE!” Hollered the short one.

    The tall one fired her jetpack, and flew out of harm’s way, letting out a savage kick and returning a burst from her machine gun as she did.

    ███████ ducked to the side, activated her time machine, and fled backward through time as rapidly as she could. And as she fled, she smiled, for she’d gotten what she’d come for:

    A name and a language.

    Wendy. English.







    With a little research, she found that the name ‘Wendy’ is an English name, quite rare until it was popularized in 1911 by the book ‘Peter Pan’. It dwindled in popularity during the 21st century, until it was all-but unused and archaic by the 22nd. And the accent of the short warrior specified a country and region.

    Western America from 1910 to 2180 was her search range, and she scoured it high and low.

    It turns out that she didn’t have to scour far; in fact, it turns out that this entire time, the troublesome heroes were from Gravity Falls; the small town which had sprung up a few miles West of the crash site. And this entire time, they were the relatives of Stanford Pines. They were among the enemies of her son.

    Their names were Dipper Pines and Wendy Corduroy, and she watched them and their family singlehandedly thwart an extradimensional invasion by the great being, in the year 2012.

    She wanted to kill them at earliest convenience, but she paused, for open combat had never worked before… Perhaps she herself was fated to be beaten by them. Perhaps destiny would not allow her victory… But her son, on the other hand… Perhaps fate would allow her son to kill them.

    So she went to find him.

    And she found him. Trapped, and sealed away like some pathetic animal, locked in a tube of glass much like the one she’d spent so many years of her own life within. But unlike her, her son had no plans. He had no hope, he had no courage and no dream, and nothing at all to hang onto except his pain… He was weak. He was pathetic. He was a failure.

    As she pressed the control to thaw him, she remarked. “You were made for so much more…”

    Then she made her way back down to her original lair, and waited for him to find her.

    She waited for a week and a day.







    Eventually he found her. And she gave him a time machine. She bid him end his enemies, and so he went and he killed Dipper Pines. And as for her, she found herself face-to-face with the other. Wendy Corduroy, the girl who might one day have become the woman Wendy Pines. One of those heroes of destiny, one of those chosen few, one of those fearless, indestructible warriors. And so ███████ tortured her with a passion and a hatred, and she dug into the depths of the girl’s mind, trying to find where such strength and destiny had come from, longing to know the secret of how this girl had received fate’s blessing. Why have you found peace and happiness and greatness, when all I’ve found is pain?!?

    It was a silly question, really. And she never did receive an adequate answer.

    Instead…

    Instead she awoke the previous morning, with no memory of the events that had transpired, no clue, no hint that anything had ever gone according to plan, nothing but a faint stinging pain in her right eye, and a powerful sense of déjà vu, an impossible and vague knowledge that somehow, she had failed. Somehow, the heroes had won again.

    And instead of two time machines, now she only had one.







    In a rage she stormed out of her lair, and took the form of a fierce winged creature, swooping out of the ship and over the treetops in a blaze of fire, flying SouthEast. Back to the strange zodiac symbol where she’d first met these warriors. Back to the black lake. Back to where it all began.

    THEY must have written this! She thought, as she landed next to the symbols. They must have drawn this for ME! They want me to find them!

    So she furiously jumped backwards to the date that had been written beneath it. Then, finding herself at the date, she warped to the exact time, spreading her claws as she landed, in preparation for whoever and whatever she may find. It didn’t matter if they were here waiting for her at full power; she had had enough suspense, she had had enough waiting and preparation, too many years of nagging, cancerous doubt. Now, she just wanted to see how it ended. If this was the ending, then she would find out how it ends.

    But… She didn’t find at all what she’d expected.

    “Hello mother.”

    She froze, shocked to silence, and turned around.

    And she saw a thing that looked, to all appearances, like a perfectly human, middle-aged man. He was wearing a hoodie and some jeans, and he had a scruffy little black beard and a crooked nose… But the pupils of his eyes were poorly-adjusted, and he had a strange smell about him, enough small hints to leave no doubt for the claim behind his greeting.

    “Who are you…” She said.

    “Um…” He shrugged. “…My name is Sam. And… I’m your son. I accompanied them from the future to tell you-”

    “Who have you become…” She clarified, interrupting him. “And what have they done to you…”

    Sam frowned.

    “I gave you a future.” She told him, sorrow in her voice. “I gave you the fertile ground you needed to grow powerful and strong… I made you great… And what did you do with it? What have you become? A puppet of theirs, a fool, a court jester, willing to dress up as one of them, willing to wander at their direction and send their messages…?”

    “You didn’t give me a future.” He told her. “You gave me nothing… Mother, you gave me nothing at all, and you made me nothing but a monster. You are the reason they hated me and attacked me for so long… All it would have taken was a hint of generosity from you, a kind word with Stanford, a chance to let me learn to speak before I was of the dangerous age… I never needed to be the monster that you made me.”

    She stared at him, willing him, daring him to continue.

    “It took until I was thirty-three years old for Stanford to offer me grace, but offer it he did. And they tamed me and cared for me and forgave me… They took time for me. They fashioned me into a feeling creature. They gave me more for me than you ever did; fairness, dignity, and goodwill. I turn forty-eight tomorrow, and as I do, I owe more to my captors. To my ‘enemies’… Than I ever did to you… My own mother… I know you’re not too stupid to understand that… But can you really be so evil?”

    “Hmm.” She glowered. “Ha… And what now.” She scoffed. “You all wrote the wrong time on the stone, so that I would come here and talk to you first… You want to convince me. Make me ‘see reason’. ‘Turn from my evil ways’. I’ve heard this word before, a long time ago: you want me to spare my own enemies…”

    “But why are they your enemies anyway?” Sam asked her. “Because they attacked you? Because they tried to kill you first? Ha. Remember that from their perspective, you tried to kill them first… It’s a circle of violence. A circle of hate that you may entirely deserve, but which is still inherently unfair in the grand scheme of things… You hate each other because fate made you do so. But me… I myself have a legitimate quarrel with you, mother. I speak in the name of everyone you have ever hurt and lied to and ruined; I speak as your firstborn son that you abandoned to the savage wolves. I speak as your just and deserved enemy, and… Mother… I challenge you to a duel to the death.”

    She took a step toward him.

    “And.” He added. “My allies… They are nearby. You are time-surrounded. So if you use your time machine, then they will arrive and use theirs, which will be the beginning of another time fight, one they will not let you escape from, a fight you know you cannot win… So ours will be a plain and simple mortal fight. Tooth and claw and blade, one on one… The winner shall walk away, to continue their life as they will, and the loser will finally perish… Do you accept?”

    She stared into his eyes, with a hardness and a bitterness and a cruelty fashioned within her by many years of evil; a stubbornness, pride and hate that had seldom known equal in this world.

    But he met her gaze with a hardness of his own. A hardness that threatened hers, that challenged not only her person and her spirit, but every evil truth she’d built her worldview upon. He wanted her to die, not to become stronger than her, not because she was a threat to him, but because he was right, and she was wrong, and wrongness deserves death. It was a will and a determination that he had learned from heroes, and had made his own.

    “This is another kind of strength.” She mused out loud. “…Perhaps you could have been good for something after all.”

    “Perhaps I still can.”

    “No… Today you will see the morals you learned come all to naught, as you die for them.”

    “But I won’t die.” He told her. “…You will.” And his voice had a sincerity and a dread to it, that made her know he’d already seen it happen.

    She took a ready stance, and shifted into a form suitable for battle.

    He stared at her for a moment, then took on a fighting form himself.

    “I’m sorry, mother.”

    Her words caught in her throat just for a moment before they came out. She’d been expecting them to sound strong and brave and defiant, but when they finally passed her lips, they sounded… Small. “I shall not bow.” She whispered.

    And she considered it a most perplexing and tragic fate; that the one hero destined to finally, truly slay the monster would be its own bastard child.



    And so, near the shore of the black lake, on a bright and sunny June day, the story of the monster ███████ finally ended. She breathed her last while lying on the ground, her back against a wall, her eyes staring angrily up at the empty sky. And so her many enemies were allowed an end to their vigil, the multitude of innocents who died by her hand were given their justice, and the chaos she’d brought to the lonely places of this world began to heal.
    There is much more to this story, far beyond that which is recorded here. But those stories are not hers. Those are the stories of heroes, stories of courage and selflessness and love, the sorts of things which she had never known. Those stories are recorded elsewhere. For this story, all you need to know is that,
    For a time,

    There was peace.