"And then she just started juggling them!" I said, throwing my hands up "I get the whole goofball attitude, but honestly, that many going off at once? We'd be at least twenty folds deep if we weren't ripped apart instantly..."
"That sounds terrifying, and the white suits couldn't tell you where they came from?" Mourner asked from the other side of the video call
"No..." I sighed, and rolled over to face the screen again "They said they'd never seen them before. I don't know who was planning on using them, but there's not nearly enough residual energy in the area for them to have been created locally."
Mourner kicked back on the couch and crossed her arms "I just hope it's not going to end up in another war... If the gods come down and get involved again, I don't think un-chosen like us would survive."
"We're more durable than most, but... yeah." I agreed.
I smiled as Pendra popped onto the screen and clumsily pulled herself up onto the sofa next to Mourner, holding a tin of sweets under one arm. She looked at me and squinted, then waved at me with her free hand as she curled up her lower half, her dozens of legs all waving too.
"'Lo, Mawd." she said in her little raspy voice "Busy?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty busy, busy being confused." I said, rolling my eyes "I'll be back soon though, and I'll kick your butt at fighting games again, so get all the practice you can before I come back!"
"I'll kik UR butt..." she said, shaking her head "Mah legz ar stronk now. Prez all tha buttonz."
"We'll see..." I said ominously
"I'll play a couple rounds with you before my patrol, Pendra." Mourner said, rubbing her head between her antenna "Maud, how's your new friend handling all the excitement?"
"She's... I can't tell." I admitted "She knows it's an issue, she implied that she led me to the weapons on purpose, but she also has this... I don't know, not flighty, but kinda 'aloof' feeling to her? I'm meeting her again in the morning to 'solve the case', but I don't think we have any leads..."
"The ol' 'poke around and hope the plot finds you', huh? I've played tabletop campaigns like that." Mourner smirked as Pendra struggled with the top on her sweets.
"Mownrer, treat?" she asked, holding it up to her
"Yeah, sure thing kiddo." Mourner said, and popped the metal lid off, sending a spray of silver confetti and glitter across the couch and the two of them, making a cloud of shimmering dust that hung in the air
"Aak! Ahm bliiiind!" Penda wailed, and fell off the couch with a small thud.
Mourner just sat there, mouth open, staring at the tin in her hands "I... I am going to have very firm words with Kiri about using glitter bombs in a prank war with a child who can't even open her own snacks..."
I snickered "I'm guessing they just roped you into the prank war too now?"
She looked down at herself, shaking her head "I'm going to have glitter in every crevice, every grain, every branch for months... I'm not joining the prank war, I'm gonna end it."
She stood up and picked her phone up off the table "I gotta go get me an Pendra cleaned up, Call me tomorrow, who knows, we may have a new team leader by then..."
"Well don't kill her over this, she does all our cooking!" I said
"I have to follow a strict dryad-specific diet and you run on electricity, Kiri's cooking skills aren't going to help her this time..."
I shook my head and waved as she hung up. I was just glad I'd gotten out of there before the pranks got too bad. I could only imagine waking up with marker all over my face and not realizing it until someone pointed it out when I was on patrol. Hopefully things would have settled down by the time I went home. Until then, I had a good four hours before I needed to get in my charge bay and I had food on my mind, time to binge that new cooking show and pretend I could eat...
~~~
I stood in the town square, waiting on Starflower to show up, but it'd been hours since I finished charging and she was nowhere to be seen. I'd done a scan of the town when I first got up, hoping to find the last remaining signature I saw last night, but there was nothing other than that fold in the woods as far as I could tell. My guess was that they'd moved all traces of the displacement radiation in order to hide their tracks, but that meant we had even fewer leads than we did last night... I headed out, I'd do my own patrol and find what I could, and hopefully the PSTCU would be able to give me more information once they finished up their study on the weapons.
I waved to a small gnome child who was watching me, and he ran up and stood shyly in front of me. I bent down and help out a hand for him to fist bump, giving him a smile.
"Hey dude, what's up?" I asked
"Do... you make balloons?" he asked quietly "The other one gives me a balloon when she sees me..."
"Ah, sorry little man, I don't have any balloons... Maybe I should get some though, I'm sorry." I said apologetically
"Why that's a darn shame!" a bubbly voice said from behind me, making me jump
Starflower stretched around me and pulled out a balloon from her skirt pocket "I think anyone who's job it is to protect the little 'uns should carry balloons with them!"
She put the balloon to her lips and took a deep 'breath', puffing it up with a hiss. She tied it off with a string and handed it to the little boy, and it bounced in the air as he smiled and gave her a hug.
"Thank you, ma'am..." he said
"Now hang on a tick, ma'am was my mother's name!" she said, raising an eyebrow "I'm Starflower to you, hot stuff!"
The kid giggled, and ran off, the balloon bouncing behind him as he found his mom. I turned to Starflower, who was standing with her chest puffed out and a look of pride on her face like she'd just saved a life and I gave a small laugh.
"I've been waiting on you for ages, and all it took to get you to show up was a balloon emergency?" I asked her teasingly
"Missy, balloon emergencies are no joke! Why, that young man's entire day just took a turn for the whimsical, and all it took was a bit of rubber and some huffing and puffing!" she said, wiggling a finger at me "I am sorry to keep you waiting, though. I reckon' we've got more ground to cover than a lone bee in a clover field."
"Yeah, I don't really know where to start, if I'm being honest..." I admitted "The trail went cold last night, and when I scanned first this this morning, there were no traces of displacement radiation at all..."
She raised her eyebrows at me and rubbed her chin "None at all? Not even a little?"
"There was a fold in the woods where-" I started
"Perfect!" she said "Let's go check that out then!"
I shook my head "No, that's highly dangerous, and I doubt there's anything left there, anyway. We need to prioritize our safety so we can continue the investigation."
"Hm, seems to meeee that the investigation leads us right to that fold, don't it?" she asked "And I'm not so sure about it being dangerous, why, unless I'm mistaken, you're mostly made of one of those fancy ladies that go into folds, ain'tcha?"
I looked down at my shiny pink torso and frowned "Well... My head, body, and jets are from a FolDrone, yes, but my arms and legs aren't. They're not shielded against the folds, I could be ripped apart if there's a fluctuation!"
Starflower laughed "If ya do, I'll fix you back to working conditions! I got a workshop way up on the north side of town, I figure I can tune ya up with whatever I have lying around. After all, they don't call you 'Mod' for your fashion sense, do they?"
I shuddered at the idea of Starflower trying to put me back together, but she was kind of right. If anyone was built to investigate the fold, it was me... If it could lead to me saving even one person from being sent into the void, it'd be worth it.
"Ok, Starflower, we'll go look, but I don't want either of us going in, ok?" I said firmly
"We'll see where the day takes us." she said "I'll race you there!"
She sproinged into the air and began bouncing toward the woods and I sighed. I activated my jets and floated after her. Interestingly enough, she was heading straight for the fold, despite me not telling her where it was... I had to wonder how much she knew she wasn't telling me... Or why she wasn't telling me...
~~~
I stared at the shining rainbow of colors and lights that ripped the forest clearing in half and shivered. I'd never actually seen a fold in person before, the closest I'd come was seeing the dimensional rift in Canyon City where I was built, but that was more of a hazy grey hole, this was... beautiful, in a horrible kind of way. One wrong move and I'd get pulled in, deep into the recesses of the folds. I watched the colors twist and shift around as I examined the clearing, it was a small fold, not one big enough to cause any long term damage, but big enough for a truck to drive into. Or... big enough for a small void slime to come through...
"Ok, Starflower, do you see anything that could help us locate the origin on the weapons?" I asked
"Hm, nope!" she said "Golly gosh oh gee, looks like we'll have to get risky then, won't we?"
"What do you mean 'risky'?" I asked, and glanced over to see her stepping straight into the fold, vanishing into the shimmering waves.
I froze, pop-ups filling my overlay, begging me to chase after her. I'd labeled her as a person in my systems after all, so the residual code from my FolDrone parts was kicking in, pushing me to 'save' the civilian from the fold. I stayed locked in place for a minute longer, then I gave up. If I went against such a basic part of my code, I could be fighting off bugs and glitches for days, and she'd still be stuck in there too. She didn't even have jets, so she'd just float forever until she bumped into a chunk of folded ground, I couldn't leave her like that...
I grit my teeth and boosted in after her, the waves of dimensional energy washing over me. My sensors flashed with images of different planes, one like ours, one made of glass, one with crumbling towers, one without magic, one that made my systems scream in protest, and I fell through the hole in space into nothingness. The void stretched around me, small chunks of land spinning past in the distance, huge shapes blotting out the ambient glow as things larger than cities coasted through nothingness, ribbons of light curling around me into the darkness, and off in the distance, a brilliant shape behind everything else, was a vast city.
It was too far away to see many details, but rails seemed to spiral out of it at all angles, huge wheels and towers jutted out of the ground, and lights covered every surface. I tried to think of what city it could be, but to my knowledge, all the big cities that had been lost had either been found already, or had been distorted even further, so we wouldn't see them here on layer one. There absolutely weren't any folded cities that big this far to the northwest though, had it drifted from somewhere in the midwest all the way here? I watched it, the twinkling lights shining back on me from an impossible distance, only visible because of the lack of atmosphere between me and it.
"Pretty, ain't it?" Starflower asked.
I turned to see her standing upside down- or, relatively upside down, there was no 'down' in the void- on a small chunk of ground with grass on it. A sign that said 'keep off the grass' was jammed into the floating ball of earth, and she was leaning on it, clearly not respecting whatever authority had put the sign up.
"Yyyyup, that's one o' the three wonders of the void right there, Shining Void City." she said, almost reverently "No one's managed to pull anyone out of it, and no one's managed to track it down before now."
I ran a search for the city in question in my database, but came up blank
"I've never heard of it..." I said "How do you know about it?"
Starflower stepped from the chunk of land she was on over to a strip of sidewalk a dozen feet away and I followed
"Why, I was made there!" she said "...Kinda."
"You were made inside a fold?" I asked. Suddenly so much about her made sense, but... at the same time, so many more questions came up
"Sure was." she said "Just got out a couple weeks ago."
She looked at me, her smile gone for once "Sorry about stringing you along pardner, but I reckon I needed you to see the whole scope, and I don't guess the feds would take too kindly to me being a void-child."
"...no, I guess not." I agreed. If they knew she was an artificial life form made and built entirely in isolation from the past hundred years of technological developments, she'd be pulled apart and studied as if she wasn't alive at all
"So... what does this have to do with the weapons we saw?" I asked her
"It's the crux of the whole thing!" she said, smiling "Why the only reason those doohickeys are topside is-"
A flash caught my eye from off in the distance, and I looked to see a twinkle from the top of one of the buildings on Shining Void City. A silent metal slug zipped past me at speeds only possible due to the lack of air resistance, and punched a hole through Starflower's chest, knocking her off the sidewalk. I screamed, and grabbed her floating body, jetting over to the fold we'd come in from. Another projectile flew past us, and still another pinged off my leg, throwing me off balance. I dashed for the fold, I knew it was risky to fly back through without sending a tether line through first, but I had no time, we could only hope this rift was still aligned to the one in the woods.
I shot through it, getting flashes of new worlds, one with trees growing to the stars, one without planets at all, one made of flesh and mouths, one with an angry light, and finally we burst out into the woods, crashing into the ground, skidding through the dirt. In the back of my systems, I felt a pang of regret at ruining my dress, but I deleted that thought and pulled Starflower up to assess the damage. She was sparking from the hole in her chest, and there was a sticky red-brown fluid dripping out. Was that blood? I scanned it, and confirmed that it wasn't 'blood', but it was a synthetic version of it at least. Her eyes were spinning spirals, and she groaned softly.
She needed help, serious help, and fast. Whoever took the shot had known where to hit her to knock out her systems, and she was barely moving as it was. I wracked my brain, trying to think of how to patch her up, but the internals I was seeing had more in common with a human nervous system than my own insides. She'd mentioned a workshop up north, but how would I even find it? It'd be like a needle in a haystack, hunting through the foggy woods until I happened to run across it. I had to try though, I blasted into the air, and scanned for any displacement radiation in the area, maybe she'd have some weapons in her workshop? she had already know about them, and-
My scanner picked up a strong signal of displacement radiation, right in my arms. I stared down, and confirmed, she was running her power entirely off of displacement radiation. How had I missed that before? I'd scanned right next to her, and never seen it pop up... I lifted into the air and jetted off to the north, scanning as I went. Surely she'd have another power cell, right? That'd have a signal I could track. As I blasted through the air, a small blip of energy showed up in the distance, perfect, that must be it.
"I'll fix you up, Starflower..." I whispered to her "And we'll solve the case together, ok pardner?"
She moaned slightly, but didn't respond. I flew faster.
~~~
I landed softly in front of the small shack and kicked the door in. The inside was a small workshop with a couple of charging bays and a table surrounded by tools, a wall of screens, and a small pile of helium tanks piled in one corner. I walked over to the table and set Starflower on it, looking for any kind of tool that could take the front plate off her chest and let me see what needed fixing. I picked up a small crowbar and put it to her side when a voice came from behind me, the door closing with a click.
"Y-you're g-going to s-step away from m-my f-friend, now, m-miss."
I turned to see another Starflower, or- not Starflower, a new person, just the same model as Starflower, standing between me and the door. This one had braided blue hair past her shoulders, slightly darker skin, and a blue version of Starflower's outfit. Where Starflower's face was twisted into a grin, this girl's face was more of a shy, scared look, accented by her larger eyes and pouting blue lipstick. What really stood out to me though, was what she had in her hands; a reality displacement projector cannon pointed straight at my chest...