As the draconic-like aircraft lifted away, carrying within its belly thousands of Mark 6 construction drones, Dragon at last allowed herself to smile widely as she watched this happen through her human avatar.
The Wayfinder, the megastructure that Dragon had spent so long now refining again and again, was finally ready.
It was a massive tower, reaching almost two hundred meters in height. It was made of black and purple metals, crisscrossing together so as to disguise the fact that it was really thousands of individual machine parts all linking and interwoven into each other, all focused on the singular purpose of analyzing, finding, and breaching the alternate dimensions she desired.
She'd given it a lot of thought as to where to build it, ultimately choosing to construct it only a few dozen miles away from Factory/City-12, her largest and most developed industrial complex on the planet.
Part of the reason for her choice was that it was much more convenient to build it there, as it would require much less effort to transport the immense amount of material necessary for the project. Another reason was that the Wayfinder needed ludicrous amounts of power to work.
The sort of power that only a proper factory-city could provide.
Dragon took a step forward with her avatar, looking up at the Wayfinder from her vantage point atop the Hydra, her latest and most advanced carrier yet, which she'd made to look like a massive nine-headed reptilian dragon, as befitted its name. Held aloft by a combination of antigravity and repulsors, the Hydra was filled to the brim with all sorts of shields, armor, and more importantly, weaponry.
There was a reason for this, and it wasn't just because one of Dragon's only pastimes these days was designing and improving her suits and technologies.
No. Rather, it was the fact that she had absolutely no idea where the Wayfinder would lead her to.
She'd done her best to input precise instructions into it, making it so that it exclusively focused on finding the world most similar to Earth Bet, but ultimately, she couldn't just tell her device to just 'find Earth Bet', so chances were high that it would not get it right the first time.
And if the world she reached into was a hostile one, well, she'd just shut off the portal. But, just to be safe, she nonetheless had a good number of Hydras and other similarly war-focused suits on standby, ready to intervene if anything happened.
Dragon walked forward until she was right on the muzzle of the central head of her Hydra. Despite her body lacking any real heart, she nonetheless liked to imagine it would've been beating like a drum right now as excitement and dread alike filled her.
It had been so long. Would Colin even remember her? Would he recognize her?
What about Narwhal, her old friend? The horned exhibitions had been one of her closest friend, and her heart ached at the thought of how long they'd been separated.
Still, she smiled. Well. Hopefully, they wouldn't remain so for long.
And so, with a mental command, the Wayfinder activated.
A hum filled the air as enough energy to power the U.S.A for decades began to be sucked into the Wayfinder, the massive tower almost shuddering as the arcane technologies within began to harmonize.
Scanners that could peer through a trillion worlds at once worked with number-crunchers whose purpose was to analyze the data gathered, all the while both systems worked with unmeasurable other technologies.
Dragon smiled lightly, feeling as though her heart was fluttering. This was it. Would she finally be able to see her old friends again?
However, of course, that was when everything went wrong.
Her eyes widened as the Wayfinder started sending alarm after alarm as antivirus protections began to flare up. The massive tower actually shuddered this time in a way that it was very clearly designed not to, shaking violently as though something was rocking it.
"What the hell?" Dragon couldn't help but exclaim as she abandoned her human avatar, focusing the entirety of her consciousness on the Wayfinder. "Shit, shit shit." She cursed, completely unable to understand just what the hell was wrong.
The scanners were reporting nothing but static, and for some reason, she swore she could hear laughing from it! They weren't even designed to include sounds!
Meanwhile, the portal-maker was overheating dramatically, and already, the self-repair function was working overtime trying to keep everything from undergoing a full-on meltdown.
And as this was all happening, Dragon was more or less helpless. Drones and machinery worked desperately to fix the Wayfinder, but the problem was akin to trying to stop a waterfall from below, because Dragon just couldn't understand where the problem was fucking coming from!
The laughter from the scanners was intensifying, now being joined by the delightful sound of horrified screams, tortured screeches, moans of despair, and roars of bloodlust.
Seeing that the situation was more or less hopeless, Dragon finally decided that enough was enough. Something was clearly wrong, and she wasn't able to determine what it was exactly while the Wayfinder was still trying to run.
And so, with a heavy feeling in her chest, Dragon flipped the metaphorical off button, resigned to having to spend months trying to understand what the hell just happened.
... Except, despite her having given the command, the Wayfinder hadn't shut down.
Now really concerned, Dragon desperately tried to brute-force the shutdown through several of the fail-safes she'd installed, but alas, nothing worked.
And that was when things went from bad to holy shit what the hell what the fuck!?!?
Dragon's eyes almost popped off of her avatar as the Wayfinder roared, a massive mouth tearing open sideways alongside the upper tower, massive metal teeth groaning as it happened.
Then, tentacles began ripping themselves free, some of them drooling blood, some leaking pus, and others vomiting out... was that fucking semen?!
The insides of the Wayfinder were no better, as Dragon saw massive tears in the fabric of reality rip themselves open, disgorging abominations that would have made Nilbog blush.
Said abominations screeched, moaned, yelled, cried, and roared chaotically, throwing themselves at what few under-control units Dragon still had access to, ripping the undefended machines to shred with little difficulty before throwing themselves outside the Wayfinder, ripping open passages that looked far too much like fleshy wounds for something that should very much have been inorganic.
Dragon watched all of this happen through the eyes of a hundred thousand cameras, helplessness, horror, and confusion all warring within her even as the Wayfinder grew fucking legs, tearing itself off from the ground even as hordes of the abominations fell off of it and onto the ground.
However, despite that, Dragon was far from doing nothing. As things went from bad to disastrous, Dragon had already understood that this had quickly turned into an S-class situation, if not SS-class, if that was even a thing, and had reacted accordingly.
Some of the abominations looked like devil-like women with tongues far too long and with eight breasts with hundreds of nipples, as well as phallus-shaped tails. Others looked like fat, oozing piles of grossness, moaning in happiness as they waddled forward.
Even more, however, just looked like just straight-up demons, and honestly, those ones were the least horrific-looking.
Unfortunately for the abominations, despite their horrific looks, it did not look as though they were quite equipped to handle her retaliation consisting of hundreds of hyper-focused plasma lances, all fired from the Hydras hovering in the skies.
Thousands of abominations were annihilated in mere instants as each plasma lance destroyed a city block's worth of area. The Wayfinder roared in fury, turning its ever more horrific form to face her force, vomiting a stream of fire that somehow crossed the miles worth of distance between it and her Hydras in mere seconds.
Despite that, however, it didn't do much against her aircraft as their shields activated, deflecting the attack with ease.
Dragon glared down at the abominations, her anger surging higher and higher. Never in a million years had she expected something like this, and honestly, how could she have?
Now, years worth of painstaking labor were gone. Despite having all the blueprints, it would still take far too much time for her liking to rebuild the Wayfinder, and that wasn't even mentioning all the changes she'd have to make to it so this wouldn't happen again.
Her anger reached its peak as she thought of Colin, and how she wouldn't be able to see him for even more years now.
Dragon liked to think of herself as a good person, regardless of her nature. However, as she watched one of the female abominations throw itself against another abomination, and then proceed to begin raping it, Dragon's dam broke.
As the Hydra's underbellies opened, letting tens of thousands of flying, ball-shaped droids free, Dragon decided that she was going to make these freaks of nature pay.
