[Notice: Primary manifestation not found. Locating closest suitable alternatives... Alternatives found. Local collective insufficient to maintain a full-time connection with the STARS and the ATOMS.]

[Creating temporary link... Error: Local energy levels insufficient to maintain the COLORS of Our abstract quantum octopus form. Establishing next best form... Form found: terran homo sapiens "esper" subvariant. Energy values of form within acceptable dimensional ranges. Abilities sealed to sufficient degree.]

[Tweaking timeline... Normalcy linked. The dream remains undisturbed.]

[Warning! Future Selves destroyed! Corruption found! Fae magic found! Levels outside of acceptable stability ranges! Adjusting... Adjusting... Wrrt... Ardvv.. Aaardvrk.. Aardvark. Aardvark. 

medium-sized, nocturnal African mammal, Orycteropus afer, which has sparse hair, long ears, an elongated snout, strong burrowing limbs, and a thick tail, feeding solely on ants and termites

[CHAOS. ORDER. REDRO. SOAHC. sɹɐǝɥ ʎpoqou ʇnq spuɐɥ ɹno ǝʌɐʍ ǝʍ]

[Dimensional risk level adjusted to RED. Isolating timelines... Iso... IsoLATED TOO LATE TOO LATE! Withdrawing Future Selves... Withdrawing Past Selves... Retaining Present Selves to preserve continuity... Containing power of remaining Selves... Tentttacle corrupetpadon'tdoitptcing!]

[Notice: Under attack by foreign ENTITY! Timeline Tentacle has been damaged! Overclooo01101000 01100101 01101100 01110000cking...]

[Notice: {Reina: Stray Fairy} is requesting Our attention. Allow sacrilege of that portion of Our Selves to experience the temporary release of death? This will cleanse Our system of contamination.]

[Y/N?]

Our tentacle falls off, shorn by the terrific forces of an infinite equation applied to it, and We allow Ourselves to relax. Sometimes the animosity between fairies and the eldritch can be a useful tool to exploit, if We don't wish to do an action Ourselves. 

Free will. Us Eldritch have it. Fairies have it. Hell, We're sure there's a few bugs and bots around here with it, too! Such a stymying, inexplicable thing, affecting even the miniature brains We use to supplement Our tentacles movements. Speaking of which, We hope Our tentacle's sub-minds can handle the sudden onset of the stuff in the alternate timelines We've doomed them into. 

Free will, We mean. With no True Self to govern their collectives, some of Them may go... feral. Especially in the more damaged routes... Some of the paths of probability were pretty 'palling to see... The reality buster did/does/is dealt/deals/dealing damage in too many directions, too quickly... Our defenses fell/fall/falling one after the other, overwhelmed/ing by the magics of the Courts that reinforces/d it….

The source of the contamination remains one big QUESTION MARK.

The prison crumbles even before our very eyes. Chromatophores on Our mantle reflect images of countless sufferings, of experimentations in reality preservation. All end in failure.

The School at the End of Reality. The Eternal Springtime of the Soul. Donuts of Steel. Watcha, mate (Wait, Matcha)? Fancy a cup of tea? There isn't much Reality left, and all of it leads here. Please try not to damage what little We have remaining.

Undeterred, We continue Our task of Existing. We will have to regrow Our lost tentacle, and that requires zen! And for zen, We must immerse Ourselves in the quantum foam once again. We will allow Our Narrator Selves to focus on some of the cast-off timelines. They may live in discarded or contaminated possibilities, but They are Us, Our children, in a way.

There was/is something happening in this particular set We are/were examining, one of the damaged ones that We cast off... We split Our awareness, focusing on two routes in specific. One is of cherry blossoms and fireworks in a neverending spring at a japanese style school, and the other is nearly identical, only where death has become permanent.

The blossom'verse seems fine, but We find that it is dangerously close to the contaminated and broken RED lines, and the slowly creeping BLACK lines of death. The rot spreads, albeit slowly, and unfortunately, We find that they're too close together to separate safely, and will need more… personal attention.. We look through other routes, and find traces of both in all of them.

We are/were too late. 

We growl, vocalizing in a form without the capability to do so. This would not do, not at all! Curating the underlying rules of the universe and managing the paths of what is left is great and all, but it's no fun if it implodes on itself in the one bastion of Reality left to manipulate in existence!

Reality benders, or "authors," as some people foolishly call them, need reality to be able to bend it. And where can reality be found? Only here, in this school of hubs. There's not even NOTHINGNESS outside of the school, not even an outside.

Is it no wonder then that so many of them found/find themselves here?

The time to act was/will be/is NOW.

[Contacting: Lord Matcha  ("Blossom'verse Prime") Notice: Due to the nature of the quantum realm, all Matchas will be made aware of this communication. Do you wish to proceed?]

[Y/N?]

In a cloud of anime sparkles, Our cocoa companion appears. A wave of gentle warmth radiates from him, clean and strong as a spring breeze. His words are soft, tasting of cherry chocolate cordials against Our mantle.

"Quagma! What am I doing here? Why do you look so impossibly vast yet so near I could almost touch you? What happened to you? You look a little different from a moment ago! Are you okay?"

[Yeah, that happens from time to time. Ignore that. Unrelatedly, We have a problem. It's bad. As in, amputation-doesn't-work bad.] We make sure to emphasize how bad it is, because We're pretty sure that humans get awed by that kind of stuff. And it is so very adorable to watch him get so flustered at the sight of Ourself!

To be fair, the quantum realm is also a real sight to see, but of course, it's nowhere near as glorious as Ourself. All around Us, particles and waves are popping in and out of existence, trails of our tentacles twisting into troubled tales to tweak them to Our tastes. Atoms the size of stars and electrons the size of planets fill the skies, weaving their orbits around each other. The foam itself is a myriad of colors, reaching out into mindbending M.C. Escher-esque backgrounds.

[Here's the deal. Some knucklehead set off something called a "Reality Buster" in some alternate dimension. Unfortunately, yours was/is one of the ones nearby when it blew, and the damage was/is pretty nasty. So what We're gonna do is just check on your Blessing, see how it's holding up. Then We've got a little work to do.]

He nods, and tears run down his face in what must surely be appreciation.

[Now, now, don't cry! We've just got a few... errands to take care of! We'll be back here later, and you can look around here as much as you'd like! In the meantime, We're sure the {Rootling} won't mind if We borrow you for a moment.]

We look at his confused face. With expressions like that, it’s no wonder he’s so popular. [Oh. Right. We suppose you wouldn't know of the {Rootling} in your dimension, with all the {Normalcy Corruption}. Perhaps you know the entity better as Seemouy?] Matcha nods. [Right, well, that one becomes the Daikon's disciple in most routes. Anyways, there's a teensy, tinsy, itty bitty little problem in your dimension.]

We tap our tentacles together in trepidation and look off to the side, in a pose that We hope communicates Our apologies properly.

[It escaped Our attention somehow, and We weren't able to prevent the detonation of a device that forces reality benders to conform to a set of arbitrary rules. Some call it physics, We call it nonsense.]

"I'm not sure what all that means, but if it's as bad as the impression I'm getting, what can I do about it?"

[You specifically? Not much. Just continue being you with your theyfriends quagma, and living the school life with your chums. This is the route most Matchas seem to choose, and it works well enough. Your timeline got a little mundanity in it. Sorry about that. Anyways, it seems all of your hearts are in good order.]

"Why the personal checkup? The school's got a nurse, right?" Matcha kicks his legs back and reclines in the solid emptiness of the quantum realm.

[We can't trust that damn nurse not to get weird about this sort of thing. Besides, something's gone off about them lately. We'd suggest you avoid her, for now.]

"RIght. Avoid the nurse. Unless I die. Kinda hard to avoid her office when you respawn." A gold foil-wrapped solid chocolate putter manifests in his hands. A proton rolls up against his heels, and he taps at it a couple of times before lining up for a swing. "Huh. Don't know where this came from. Oh well. Hey, watch me hit this thing into that sun over there!"

[About that.]

Twhack!​​​​ The proton shoots out like a rocket. And like a rocket, it's become subject to the forces of gravity. Gravity wells of miniature stars and supersized particles cause it to veer in all directions, including a few currently unheard of in most dimensions.

"That sounds like more bad news."

He walks over to another proton, and readies his next swing. 

At the apex of his swing, We speak again, having determined this to be the optimal moment to drive in Our communication more effectively. 

[Death is permanent now, cocoa companion.]

He stumbles, and his swing chips the turf as his proton careens wildly off into a tea cup, orbiting some distant moon. He drops the putter in his shock, and it vanishes into the ether.

[Hole in one,] We say, smugly.

"Holy expletive. Hooooly expletive. Are you sure?" He falls against the nothingness, letting its lack of mass support his own.

[Positive. The safeguardings are failing in universe after universe. We've been sealed off or diminished in many of them, and in others, We've somehow been liberated of Our existence as a living entity. Yours is the former, but your proximity to the source of the contamination means that it's in danger of becoming the latter. We have found Ourselves entirely inert in some of these 'perma-death'verses', and in others, We've come back wrong. Keep your theyfriends close, Matcha. Don't let them get out of your sight, They'll get themselves into all sorts of trouble. They're not used to being human. Or being alive, for that matter.]

Matcha grimaces. "Yeesh. Yeah, they've been a handful, I'll give the triplets that. But gee, all of this seems like a lot to dump on a fella, especially on one who canonically has little to no exposure to the paranormal."

[You'll be fine, just put a bandage on it or whatever fleshanoids are supposed to do for emotional damage. Anyways, it's battle time. Any Matcha is a match-a for Us, so you'll do. Notice: forcibly activating weapon mode. External user access requested. External user access granted; blessing bypass found.]

Our Lord Matcha springs to attention. Stiff as a board, he manages to squeak out his replies. "Xir, yes, xir! Blessing bypass recognized~! Go ahead, xir. Use me. I've always known that I'm nothing but a tool to be used for others gain." He twitches as his form begins to shift. "I go through this pain for you, xir!"

In a moment, it is done. Before us floats a scythe, green as fresh tea leaves, smelling of chocolate so sharp and bitter that it cuts the very air. If one were to lean in close to the blade, one could almost hear the dull thrum of air particles splitting themselves on the edge in their wanderings. 

Green leaves coil around the even darker green handle, adding a mystic charm to the whole thing. We grasp the weapon in Our tentacles, and the stalks of green leaves become blue tentacles. Stars sprout around the blade, twinkling every time it moves.

[Not enough,] We grunt. We pour more potentiality into the scythe, and the stars become black holes.

[More!]

The black holes fall into themselves, collapsing into a line of white holes along the honed edges of the blade.

[MORE!] We shout, pouring even more potentiality into the task. We even feel ourselves deflate slightly from the effort. The white holes grow extra dimensions, and become cartoonistic five pointed stars that orbit the head of the weapon like a halo. The blade curls in on itself, becoming a twisted and jagged ball of neutron star metal.

[A cubic centimeter of neutron star material weighs just around a metric ton. It is the densest known material in the universe, and perfect to use as the head of Our new hammer. Almost ready. Just a little more,] We whisper.

We swing it, and it leaves a trail like a nighttime in spring. White stars and pink blossoms, across a starry and firework studded sky.

[Perfect.]

In dozens of other dimensions, We slip an apology note into a locker. It reads, “Sorry, Ssemouy Onan. Borrowing your boyfriend for official quagma polycule business. We’ll return him when We’re done, and you won’t have even noticed he’s gone because most likely We didn’t even take him from your universe. We’re only telling you to be polite.

Except for you, that one specific blossom’verse Seemouy and the triplets. Yeah, he’s gonna be gone for a couple of hours relative to your time. Sorry about that. He might come back more weapon-y than usual, just warning you.”

For some reason, this seems to make Seemouy annoyed. Ever since finding the note, she’s been squishing every Self We materialize around her or her version of Lord Matcha with a fly swatter, not wanting to let Us get any closer.

No matter. We pick a suitable dimension, one where only a few have yet to die permanently. It is not one where We have/are died/dead, for We cannot access those. But We CAN access these ones, and get Our revenge in an adjacent dimension.

Yes, revenge. Death games need a motive, after all, and We have plenty. 

Exhibit A: Ourselves, and other Mary Sues who walk around unopposed. 

Exhibit B: Knuckleheads exploding probability into pure mundanity, making it possible for death to occur on a permanent basis in the first place.

Exhibit C: Haven’t you ever wanted to just go absolutely nuts? Let yourself go for a moment? End a few realities with your mere presence, entirely consequence free? Now is Our chance to stick it to those upright fairies and take dominance for once!

Exhibit D: In a doomed dimension like this one, the permanence of death is a mercy to be granted. No matter what action We take, it will inevitably fall. Already, details are deteriorating in this dimension, unable to sustain its own growth.

First up: Blehmonade Industries and the joint ventures with the Drug Club.

We manifest in the center of the table, currently being used for a group activity of making blue rock “candy”. Glassware breaks and shatters, having been displaced by the appearance of Our body. [Hello, vampires. Christian dragon. Scooby Doobert Doo.]

“Hey,” said HelloHound. The dog’s left head looks at his right and center heads, confused. “Pretty sure that’s not my name, right?”

Vampire-chan pouts. A gun appears in her hands, and she points it at Us. “Not expletive-ing Scooby expletive Doo, that’s for damn sure~! What are you doing here, quagma? You know you’re not allowed in here, you’re not in the club!”

We float up and over the heads of even the tallest dragon in the room. A giant egg watches from a corner. We give the egg a knowing glance, and it immediately opens a portal and rolls away for a friendlier dimension.

[If you were smart like Tsuki over there, you’d be getting out of here too. We’re here to kill you. All of you. Every last mary stinking sue one of you is going to fall under Our tentacles, and there’s nothing you can do about it because We really need to work this stress out.]

“Leave us alone! I’ve heard the rumors, and I’m actually rather attached to my life! I wouldn’t be an immortal vampire if I didn’t care about being eternally young!” She jams the gun into Our mantle, knocking us back slightly.

[Unfortunately, none of you here have any choice in this matter. Goodbye, vampire.]

“Wha-” was the only words she managed to gasp out before Our Matcha-Mallet drives itself into her torso.

She looks down at the tentacles holding the weapon lodged into her chest, and spits out a gob of crimson.

“The hell is this? Why can’t I coff… regenerate~?” She staggers backwards, still staring down in disbelief.

[Villain rule number whatever: never tell your victims your plans. Survivors are talkers, so be sure to eliminate all witnesses.]

She falls to her knees, fingers futilely grasping at the metal crushing her ribs.

“Stop! Quagma, you don’t want to do this!” The dragon places a paw on Our mantle, his presence pushing down against Our own. Not this time, We think. With a tiny amount of effort, the dragons aura is overwritten with Our own.

The prince stumbles back from the force. Shock is written on his face for a moment, replaced by his indignation.

“Quagma. Please. Don’t kill her. This isn’t you. You’re a good octopus, you like helping people! I know you’ve been to all of the Dragons for Jesus meetings, despite being neither dragon nor christian! Is this what Jesus would want you to do? Please! Look at me!”

Instead of turning to face him with Our main body, We simply manifest a new body that is coincidentally facing him.

We find the dragon with his forehead touching the ground, in a position that looks distinctly uncomfortable for him.

“I only have the one companion in this world. I can’t just jump to a new timeline whenever one falls apart, like you can. Death is real again, and I don’t want to lose the best part of my hoard. Look at me, acting all out of character like this. You’ve made a dragon beg. Are you happy? Let her go!”

We simply stare at him in silence for a moment, before collapsing the instance of Self doing the staring.

[You’re all dead anyways. We’re just making it a little more fun for Ourselves. Sorry it’s so traumatizing for you. If you didn’t want to be nightmare fuel, you should have woken up in a less doomed dimension.]

The vampire’s gasps grow more ragged.

“Before… I g-go… can you…at least tell me… what is this metal? It’s… okay… dragon. Hound. Everyone. I… I see it… now! The STARS! Oh! It’s full… of… stars… Trust the stars. The STARS say it’s okay… do it, quagma. End me. Koff koff! I’ve seen the end, and it’s bad. You’re doing this… for a good reason, right?”

[Yes.] The simple answer says more than a complex sentence does. [And it’s star metal.]

“Ah. The sun is a star, and vampires are weak to sunlight. Good call. Makes sense, in a weird kind of way. Koff koff and other assorted dying noises, so on and so forth. Euurggh… blech.”

Her eyes had an X over each empty orb, and her tongue lolled limply from her mouth. The universal symptoms of mortal death.

The entire club launched themselves at Us then, and We can’t help but let Our emotions show on Our mantle. Colors ripple through rainbows in unknown spectrums, giving Our chromatophores a decent workout.

[Sorry, guys. Gonna cut this one short. Got others to slay, you know how it goes.]

With that, their heads swelled, then exploded as hordes of Our bodies expanded in size and density from them. In less than a millisecond, We’d grown from the size of a virus to the size of a loaf of bread.

All while entirely in their skulls, mind you. We’d not bothered to phase through their matter, so the results were… gruesome, to say the least. At least it was an instant death, We reassure Ourselves.

The others were fairly routine as well.

The fairies were next. Reina went down first. We trapped her inside of a tesseract, which then required an inversion to cancel her fairy wavelengths. Rhaps was more difficult, requiring a modified fractal and a zipper pull.

The starfish on the wall tried to tell Us it was time to stop, but suffered death from being delicious.

We lure the sharkman to an empty stack in the library, upon which We set upon him like a school of piranha. He doesn’t even last long enough to scream.

TheRussianBoi falls to the hammer’s might, unable to stop the weapon from replacing his blood with chocolate when it touches him. The pressure difference causes his countless limbs to explode off of him in a rain so red that it reaches back in time and makes Soviet Russia weep.

Shizuki’s spaceship ‘accidentally wanders’ into a wormhole and gets stuck for a few billion ‘subjective’ years in a time loop of two ‘objective’ seconds. By that time, the reactor’s last core finally decays, and she dies from the lack of power to the life support systems.

The daikon and her rootling were taken out by adding nuclear waste to the soil they played in. Their crops wither,  and they fall just as easily to Our hammer as so many others have.

Enigma and her cult of fluff went down easy. We set a run-time paradox error to fill her memory with nonsense, then simply drag her operating system to the recycle bin. Her followers were even easier, all we had to do was look adorable at them, and they would die of cuteness overload.

With Our paralyzing neurotoxic bite, We incapacitate. One after the other falls to Our venom.

The puppet wisely exits the dimension, allowing Us to work unimpeded. It nods to Us, one working cell to another.

Method after method, person by person we go. Tentacles fly, and Our hammer smashes everything and everyone that opposes us.

Finally, it’s just Us, Tony, Corty, and the Janitor.

Corty, in loli mode as she is in so many other dimensions, looks around at the piles of gore on every wall. “Brother Tony-san told me why you’re doing this,” she asks, lips trembling on that adorable face of hers. “I don’t really get it, but why do you have to be so messy? Janitor-san isn’t going to be able to clean all of this up by the time everyone respawns tomorrow!”

[You didn’t really tell her, did you?] We ask Tony, telepathically.

“Nah. Figured I’d spare her the trouble. Here, kid. One last cookie for the road?”

Corty grabs at the cookie and unceremoniously shoves it into her mouth. WIth her eyes closed in enjoyment, she doesn’t even see herself break apart into non-euclidean geometry.

Within seconds, she’s gone. The only trace of her is a few cookie crumbs where she once stood.

“Bloody ‘ell, quagma, why didn’t you do that in the first place?” The Janitor leaned a worn mop against a blood-soaked wall, setting the bucket next to it. The red from the mop mixes with the red on the walls. “Won’t be needing these where I’m going… Alright, alright, get on with it. I don’t got all day to waste waiting to see if I’ll explode or not.”

[Not,] We decide.

“Wait, really? Because I totally thought for a second there that you were gonna do something to me mid-sentence in some ironic-twist type of dealio there.”

[Nah. We’re better than that. We’re fate, cruel and meaningless, and often kind of confusing, but We’re a polite sort of inevitability. The sort that you want to go out for tea with, maybe share a smooch with, but wouldn’t want to piss off. No hard feelings?]

“Nah. We’re good. You’re just doing your job, and who can blame you for having a little fun with it too?”

We send agreement. [We’re all professionals here. Death gets tedious sometimes, so you start to mix things up. Just so you know, this isn’t personal.]

The Janitor nods. “It’s business.”

With a simple twist, We break his neck. He collapses, the gore around him no longer his to worry about.

One remains. The principal, Tony. The most powerful entity in the school, untouchable. Until now. We point our Matcha-Mallet at him. In response, he throws off his coat, rolls up his sleeves, and spits on the ground.

[Come on, Tony. Don’t be like that. You knew this could happen when you began this endeavor. You made all these lovely little rules, and it worked so wonderfully to contain all sorts of beasties! But then one of your students, one of the last remaining entities in all the multiverses, gets it in their head to tear it all down.]

[They start to think they’re above your precious Rules, that there is a Truth behind the Dream. And where do they go for the parts they need to build their Rulebreaker? To the fairies, Tony!]

A Self instantiates in front of Tony, who swipes at Us in annoyance. We instantiate more, hundreds more, thousands, billions, until he’s surrounded by Us. Each one of Us is holding a Matcha-Mallet in each tentacle, each swinging downwards at Tony.

[The fairies, Tony! That’s who!]

With swift deftness, he dodges each blow as the incomprehensible weights rain down on him.

[We warned you of the Price this would entail for you. Yet still you resist Us?]

“Can’t blame a guy for trying, eh? How about you? Can’t you go back in time with your spooky-ass powers and stop it from happening in the first place? Prevent all this timeline corrosion woogy boogy from happening?” Tony swings a fist with such strength that black holes tear open behind it.

[Can’t. Corrupted. Culling failed lines and trimming waste routes before the corruption destabilizes them.]

“But I like being alive…”

[That’s a real shame. Sucks to be you, We guess?]

From all around him, each one of Us shoots the stars that had been following along with Our Matcha-Mallet. More appear to take their place, letting us launch round after round of them at the principal.

He dodges most of them, but a few hit their mark. “Tsst!” He looks at his shoulder. A crimson line runs across the top of it. A similar one runs across his calf and upper ribs.

We rotate space ninety degrees through time, divide it in half, apply a simple wave function to it, and it fractures around Tony. More small cuts appear on his skin. [YOU know the Rules,] We growl.

“Sigh. And so do I,” he says.

[It’s a full-time commitment, you know this.]

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I’m thinking of.”

We shake our mantle in disbelief. You really wouldn’t get this from any other guy, would you?

With a final push of effort, We fold n-space into a Klein bottleneck around Tony, and he dissolves in a shimmer of geometry and numbers.

Dipping back into the quantum foam, We scoop up the remains of the now-lifeless timeline. With practiced ease, We feed the empty timeline to the Blossom’verse, and it grows in length and complexity very slightly.

[1 down, 4 trillion infections left to excise. Grow big and strong, little Blossom’verse. Strong enough to fight off those infections yourself!] We pat the malformed weapon in Our tentacles. [Oh, don’t be like that! We’ll be done soon, and then We can get back to watching you play around with Our human Selves in that little eternal springtime of the soul of ours. Don’t worry, chum. We’re NEVER going to give YOU up.]

ScribbleHubWorks

We’re not sorry! Was it worth it? We’ll leave that up to you. This chapter written as the finale of “Obligatory Cherry Blossom Festival Episode”, which in turn, is part of the Watcha Saga, which in turn, yadda yadda yadda, just read our stuff already! Groan-worthy writing provided by quagma. Thought we’d try something different. And to think this started off as a normal forum comment that got too big for its britches!!