A Mask of My Own Face [Lovecraft Mech Quest]

Chapter 25: Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
...which is, much like many other chapter titles, the name of a Lemon Demon song...

I'll never be normal.

In retrospect, the fearsome dragon known as Tinvarbater was no more than a footnote in Daniel's long history of slain monsters and odd encounters.

He'd met and dined with kings and generals, was a member of the special forces, and brokered an alliance between his own people and the Great Old Ones, along with Hastur the Unspeakable. If this were a kinder world, one that wasn't so apocalyptic and not so ruined, no one would have believed in any of this, because it was insane.

And so, he'd never be normal.

They'd found Zachariah's resting place as being in an Arkham intensive care unit, in an otherwise normal hospital. He'd been placed there some time ago - two or three weeks - induced into an artificial coma, and then effectively forgotten about. To an apparently supernatural degree. It had been Zachariah's apparent strategy for continued survival; manipulating the staff of various hospitals to shuffle him around from place to place, to avoid any investigators from finding him too easily. As soon as Euphony had made its landing on the tarmac outside, the Black Oneirodyne - Visionless, manifested and struck.

The fistfight that ensued was brief, a number of blows and jabs that could core the insides of mountains made in a split second, punctuated sometimes with Anti-Dream rounds from Euphony's armaments.

Visionless attempted to cast some kind of illusion on the local area, but with his mastery over the Dream, Echo was no longer fooled as he'd been, when Innsmouth was broken. He dispelled it with a purging wave of Resonance, apparently to Visionless' consternation, as it disengaged in that exact moment.

And soon, the rest of Squad Evollie made their landing, they started to provide fire support, the Oneirodynes enhanced with thaumaturgical runes on their plating, each one glowing a brilliant white light, as if from the inside of a star. Euphony restarted its attack at melee range, now with Lucidity and Threshold in support.

Somehow, though, Visionless turned into a white mist and floated up into the air, and then headed for the sky above.

"Follow it!" came Whateley's voice over the radio.

Euphony was first, flexing its legs at the knee, then leaping up like an upthrust glaive. The rest of Evollie followed with minimal delay, leaping and then blasting off into space with rocket attachments and sheer forceful Resonance carrying them skyward at maybe half of Visionless' own velocity. In the air, Lucidity and Voidmist were the fastest of anyone at long distances, the former able to blast on psionic exhausts, and the latter capable of transforming into a white cosmic mist alongside its pilot. Even Threshold, bending space and blinking forward in fast increments, lagged behind.

There wasn't much point to fighting, even out in the vacuum of space. It'd be far easier to dodge fired rounds here, than in an atmosphere. It'd be more prudent to catch up to their target and then deliver the beatdown of its life.

Oneirodyne Visionless skidded forward, using a cloud of meteors as cover. With a blast of Resonance and some kind of unknown power that allowed for control of matter, it threw at least twenty of those meteors in their direction.

Oneirodyne Lucidity sped onward on its mechanical wings, expelling green flames from its exhaust ports. It swiped a wrist, and a long sinuous cord snapped out and dug into the closest meteor. As it swung around, using itself as the axis, the meteor was returned to its origin. One of the smaller ones impacted it, causing all of them to break and shatter into fragments that created a sort of flare cloud that absorbed most of the lesser celestial objects thrown in their path. Some of them broke through, but most of Evollie had already slowed down their thrust and came to a relative stop.

"Surrender," Daniel transmitted across space. The surprise attack had been rather measly by their standards, even if it could have destroyed cities back on Earth.

The Black Oneirodyne didn't honor them with a reply. It blinked across space, in cover still, and fired a number of pitch-black darts at the cover that Lucidity made. Each dart seemed to sink into the meteorite shells, corroding them on the exterior, slowly eating through, like acid. One of them grazed Aureate's shoulder, producing a black emptiness in its armor. The emptiness disappeared a moment later with a pop of vacuum, showing that it had left behind a hole going into the Oneirodyne's machinery. The black energy seemed to ignore Resonance and physical durability, at least to a degree.

"Surrender, Zach," Daniel said again, teeth grit. "Or at least respond."

Using his name and confronting him, it seemed, brought some degree of exasperation and simultaneous abnegation to Visionless' pilot. The Oneirodyne across from them seemed to almost relax as if settling down. Its head stared at them with baleful red eyes.

"I have my mission," he said. "I'm sorry, Dan. I'm sorry that you had to be the one to die here, I didn't want-"

"Don't fucking call me Dan," he rebuked. "You're not my brother. You stripped those memories away, remember? You killed him already. And no, you're not sorry; I don't believe that in the least. You're trying to destroy the universe. You're outnumbered and vastly overpowered; I can destroy you in a second flat, if I so desire. It's up to you whether you're behind the wheel of the truck as it rolls down the hill, or if the wheels are going to move on their own, outside of your control. This is your one last chance to surrender, or I'll give them the fire at-will."

Zachariah breathed in, audible over the radio, and there was a slight almost-shudder to it. "Well, that makes it easier, then."

There was a distortion. It felt as if cold needles were being entered into Daniel's flesh through his skin, as the Resonance warped in front of him. A blast of darkness in every direction, emanating outward from Visionless at speeds that Daniel was unable to process; light-speed, or something close to it. The darkness rolled over them and disintegrated their cover, and then started to bubble and writhe over the surfaces of their armor; Lucidity moved back to shield Euphony with its own body, for its durability was far greater even now.

"Echo," Cortex said over the radio. Daniel frowned. "Focus."

"Negotiations fell through. Attack," Daniel said.

Visionless came at them, a sword of compressed micron-wide Final Particles forming in its fist. It swung it at Lucidity, forced it to dodge, and revealed Euphony. There was nothing between them, aside from a metaphorical tunnel. It was the narrow tunnel of decision: to move forward and kill, or to go back?

Daniel wasn't going to wait until his brother chose. He'd choose for him.

And then Euphony began to sing; a soft, pleasant clinking, as if peaceful windchimes were ringing across a vast and featureless, empty plain of barren earth.

And each of those chimes was a supernova in miniature, a dynamic pop of Resonance and Dream so impossibly thick it could fuel or diminish a hundred arcane rituals. Its goal, however, wasn't to empower or diminish. It was, after all, a lullaby: a song for the conquered.

There was no medium for vibration in the middle of space, so the song resonated through space itself as it pushed onward, and it blasted Visionless into another one of the asteroids it had spread around in its initial volley. The cosmos itself seemed to darken, the distant stars becoming obscured as if lulled to sleep.

As Visionless' systems failed, its powers sedated, Oneirodyne Threshold blinked into space under it, and the unit swung its oversized sword to sever the bottom half of the large black Oneirodyne from its upper half. The rest of Evollie didn't even need to move in, or fire. There was no need.

A hundred cords wrapped around Visionless' arms to restrain it, as Commander Whateley fired out from Threshold's cockpit and boarded Visionless.

There was no epic battle. There was no epic showdown or ultimate challenge. There was no heroic sacrifice as told in the wondrous stories of myth and legend, and there was no tragedy or comical conclusion to the action. There was, almost, an absence of that final note in a song; as if the narrative had been bitchslapped.

It was a simple take-down of an insane maniac and were it not for the mechs and outer space, it would have been perhaps the most mundane thing in the world.

And yet, it'd never be normal.

Echo sighed out in a combination of relief and strange whimsy, as he watched the Black Oneirodyne collapse into phantasmal particles, Threshold reaching out with a hand to place Whateley and their sleeping captive into its cockpit.

And maybe, even so, being something other than normal wouldn't be so bad? Only the future would know.

---

"And what happened then?" Alexiel leaned over the counter, her assets nearly falling out of her dress as she smirked at her boss. "Did the Black Oneirodyne's driver consume the yeast in your belly button?"

"I don't have a belly button," Faust answered with casual disregard, as he flipped a page in the arcane tome before him - the Triumphant Return at Dawn. He'd promised himself that he would cherish it dearly, and then find a world where the creator was still alive. "And it's not a driver - it's a pilot, you stupid fucko."

"Go soak in vinegar, Windfallow," she scoffed at him, moving behind the counter again to peck at her shitty fashion magazines from a 24th century Earth, where Gothic lolitas became strangely popular for some reason.

"No, seriously, though," his other, more respectful student, Emily asked. She leaned forward in an almost-bow, her poor mockery of a raven's mask nearly slipping off - the sad amateur had to use a hand to fix up her left strap, and it disgusted him to the core. Couldn't the bitch learn adherence magic already? "What happened after that?"

"Oh, uh," Faust paused in reading Berserk to recall. He'd only started this conversation to distract them from making fun of him for crying that Miamura was dead. In the main timeline, at least. "They became Gods and there was peace in the universe forever and ever after."

"That's boring," Alexiel said.

"Well, if you're so bored, we can go and pay them a visit," Faust said in low, ominous tones, unmoving save for what movements had to be spared to speak in that way. "I'm sure the Auditor won't hurt you... too much."

"Wait, so Daniel became the Auditor? The Auditor?"

"Yeah, he used a bunch of arcane rituals to transcend or whatever," Faust said. "I don't know. I didn't stick around after that. It was fun to watch him kick his shitheel of a brother to the curb while eating popcorn, but I hate those sappy endings where everything's fine and utopian afterward."

"That's it!" Alexiel said, dropping her magazines to the floor. The Raven's Arcana automated cleaning software detected the trash suddenly falling on its pristine floorboards and incinerated all of it on the atomic level, causing Alexiel to gasp before she could say whatever she wanted to. "Hey! That isn't trash, you stupid AI!"

"Good job, AI," Faust said. It wasn't even an AI, but whatever. He looked to Alexiel, closing up the manga prematurely. "What's it?"

"We need to go and create a dystopia!"

"No, fuck you!" Faust burst out. He felt a sudden warmth of inflamed and passionate anger in his chest; a rare sensation for an immortal lich. "You're saying that because you want the Lotus Bitch to get on my case again! Try it, you cheap, fake paladin!"

"Ha! Or what?" Alexiel asked as she fluttered her eyebrows, making her beautiful violet eyes twinkle in the shadows, like sublime jewels. "You'll suck me off?"

Faust breathed in. There was only one, proper response to this.

"What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Zeiraam Empire's Honor Guard, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on the Maervar-Lund, and I have over three-hundred confirmed kills. I am trained in glorb warfare and I'm the top hit-wizard in the entire Multiversal Safety Alliance. You are nothing to me but just another fucko. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Cosmic SDB, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the distance of a room? Think again, fucko. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the Meiradan Cluster and your Elan Vital Energy is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, fucko. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven thousand ways, and that's just with my rusted tablespoon-"

As Faust recited his copypasta threat with verbose precision, Alexiel sighed and walked over to Emily. "Wanna get Chinese?"

The young girl looked up at her with a bright smile. "In actual China, this time?"

"Yep."

Both of them left through a portal, while a rather confused Xylzrilyn walked into the room. "What's going-"

"-Not only am I extensively trained in verbal shit-throwing, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Raven's Arcana Not-For-Clients Stock and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the cosmos, you little fucko. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little 'clever' comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking ass. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn fucko. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, fucko."

Faust breathed out. "I think that was a new record. Anyway, what were we talking around?" He turned around, only to see that he was alone in the room - even Xylzrilyn had fled whilst he was occupied wasting his breath. "Hm, back to reading manga, I guess. Fuck 'em."

---

The Auditor of Echoes, the One Who Hears Plights, known in his civilian identity as Daniel Hitts, relaxed as he sat back in the classic Finnish sauna.

It was an accurate existential simulation of the experience, capable of fooling even the senses of a being operating at his magnitude. He'd created the sauna for himself and his friends, to give them some reprieve, among the hundred other small distractions and amusements. It was something to naturally enamor oneself with at such an old age; Daniel was no longer the young boy he used to be. He'd grown a rather sizable wizard's beard, to complement the wisdom he attempted to radiate when speaking to others.

It was hard to cultivate a personal image and believe in it, but the classic wizard seemed to fit him. The Sorcerer-King at first, and then the legendary Auditor. Even if regardless, he was a god, he'd always liked the more erudite tasks and reading books as a hobby, acquainting himself with culture. Such undertakings remained a dirty little pleasure even into his tenth century in this universe; one of his twenty-eight secretaries was hired for the sole purpose of reading and reviewing fiction that humanity produced and bringing the most interesting pieces to his attention.

"So, how're the projections for next century?" Magdalene questioned.

Much like Daniel, she'd grown up in a staggering fashion. He imagined that if the youthful members of Squad Evollie were to meet the Tribunal of their adult versions, they'd be in for quite a nasty shock. Somewhere into her late eighties, Maggie had requested to be referred to as Magdalene from then on. Rather than losing either her cheerful or her nasty side, both of them seemed to merge into a woman of sarcastic jabs and constant eye-wrinkling amusement. The psychological change was accompanied by a physical one, with her candyfloss hair becoming a dark, almost sensual purple.

"Hm? It's five years off, still," Daniel said, voice flowing like the sibilant tugs of a violin string. He pulled a hand across the strands of his beard, stroking it, as Nodens often did. He'd picked up the habit of beard-stroking from the Elder God, Daniel was pretty sure. "I didn't make any plans yet. Inadvisable without divination, anyhow."

"Well, I suppose that's up to you to judge, hm?"

"For I am God, and I judge," he replied in calm tones, not even gracing the in-joke with a sigh. He manifested some more hot rocks in the water bucket, causing an eruption of steam that prompted Walter to sigh in contentment.

Together with his friends, the Auditor Daniel Hitts created an empire that spread across the stars.

And hand in appendage in hand, with the Great Old Ones and Elder Gods, they'd tamed the sum of the universe and made it their own. There were some hiccups, early on, in the first decade of their rule; none of them even knew how to, forcing Commander Whateley to lead them onward. And of course, both Nyarlathotep and Kthanid were rather unamused with the prospect of eternal peace with their greatest enemies. But the vision of the future that Daniel showed them was sufficient to sway them, for it was a simple truth. The cost, naturally, was the suffering of Azathoth, and in extension, Daniel's brother.

It was saddening. After centuries of introspection, Daniel comprehended that what he felt for Zachariah was a mixture of pity and hatred, but the years had softened him. Now, he only felt a kind of dim sadness, that it couldn't be resolved better. It was, however, necessary to bring the Unseen Empire to the height of its glory.

It was incremental progress of technology and magic that allowed them to overcome the greatest hurdles. Supernatural forms of technology and power, to end scarcity and mortality forever. In the modern age, any human could simply decide to fly; the laws of the universe were programmed such that, if any human being over the age of eighteen decided to, it could simply ignore the forces of gravity and the dangers of outer space, to fly to other worlds under their own will. There were also luxurious space ships that could do so faster while providing amenities on the path of travel, and those were provided for almost free by the shipyards.

And soon, the Auditor of Minds, Carter, wanted them to spread across other universes, outside of the Great Dream, in order to make more space for their citizens and to bring new and unenlightened peoples into the fold. It'd lose them some of their advantages, but he was confident in Daniel's ability to figure out some loophole; to carry the Dream with them, perhaps even propagate it as a song they could all share in. The Auditor of Echoes was the Tribunal's trouble-shooter, alas.

"I'll go see to any issues in Sol," Magdalene said, standing up and wiping herself off with a mere thought. With a curt flick of the wrist, she was clothed and striding out.

Walter gave her a whistle, as she left.

"It's a shame none of us ever hit that."

"Don't be disgusting, Walt," Melissa pleaded with a sigh.

"At this rate, she'll be two-thousand years old and still a virgin," Walter said, as if looking for support in the rest of the elder beings in the sauna. Hastur, appearing no different from a man with yellow hair and serpentine eyes, only smirked at him.

"Maybe she's looking for the right person?" Daniel offered a theory.

"She hasn't found one in several centuries, then," Carter said. "She's bad at looking."

"Or maybe she's waiting for Carter to make the first move," Frank said, ever the perceptive. Daniel hoped not to say it outright.

Carter released a deep breath. "I told you this, at least fifty times before, I don't think it'd work between Magdalene and myself."

"Do or do not, but always try," Daniel imparted wise advice, affecting his wizard's tone. A few people smiled, to the sides, but Carter only watched him with a lidded gaze, as if completely unimpressed. "You're afraid that you'll screw up your relationship, aren't you? And then, she'll abandon you, and nothing will be normal again?"

Carter nodded. Some of the people in the sauna made ooh sounds.

"Well, I used to be afraid of deviating from normalcy myself," Daniel said. "And then I became a god capable of doing utter bullshit, like this." He raised a hand and from it sprouted a shower of spectral blue flakes, which created the image of a dragon. A small portal opened, and the dragon flew through it while roaring.

"Your point is that I shouldn't be afraid of something never being normal again," Carter said dryly. "That's stupid advice, Dan."

"Is it stupid of me to offer stupid advice, or is it stupid of you to point out that it's stupid, rather than believe in yourself?"

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Yes, it does - a wizard speaks in riddles," Daniel sagely continued, as Walter chuckled. "That you cannot decipher them, is your own fault."

"I'll give it a try," Carter waved them off. "Maybe."

"Here," Daniel said, reaching into a dimensional pocket and throwing a flap of cloth at Carter. "It's a mask of my own face. If you wear it, maybe you'll stop being such a coward, Remi." There was some laughter across the room, especially from Carter himself.

---

Select an epilogue (only one; all other epilogues will be considered non-canon):

[ ] The Mirage Below - The Unseen Empire opens its first multiversal network hub and its first portal. Its docile expansion starts to occur at a slow and then exponential rate until a certain entity watching the sky notices it; a conflict is inevitable. Will our heroes persevere, and if so, what rewards shall they reap?

[ ] The Unseen and Unheard - After the passage of a full millennium, Daniel wanders back to Castle Faeucelevei and visits his imprisoned brother, there. They share a brief conversation about this and that and Daniel says that he's fine with the Great Dream being a Nightmare, because Azathoth is no longer the Dreamer. Someone else is...

[ ] The One Ring - The matter of the Alliance lingered still, and Daniel's compact had been to, in some method, connect himself to the Great Old Ones. The solution which best officiates the matter in a way satisfactory to both sides, is, naturally, holy matrimony. Daniel marries Hastur's niece; a rather cute girl who's heard of his exploits.

[ ] The Desolation of Tinuviel - After the Unseen Empire's inevitable dominion stalls and plateaus, and the Empire becomes autonomous, the Auditor of Echoes feels a strong pull to adventure. He recalls some of TInvarbater's words about his matron and decides that's where he'll head next.

[ ] The Next Great Adventure... - Rather than an epilogue, bring up the voting options for the next Quest. Starts the next Quest much earlier and offers impactful rewards in the character-building section.