cathfach
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Fetch Quest Chapter 108: Dea Ex Machina
🕑 Added 2022-03-07 06:21:08 +0000 UTCI took a step in a direction that any compass would struggle with, but that led directly from the demon lord's lair to the fox-kin temple. I didn't particularly need to do this there, but having the priestesses around would help.
The hall was occupied only with a single priestess, praying to my shrine in silence. Her older brother was sick with something that healing magic couldn't touch. It didn't take long to locate the fox-kin in question and spot the lymphoma. Cancer. No wonder healing magic didn't touch it.
Maybe holy magic would work? It was hard to consider something non-sapient as 'evil', but if anything could qualify, cancer sure would.
Regardless, I didn't need to think that hard about it. An act of will was all it took to fully cure him. Yes, the black dragon was right; I would always favour those in front of me. Even if I knew everyone, it didn't mean I was going to look through them all. All the more reason to get the heck out of here the moment I was done doing all I needed to do.
I didn't look anything like the statue. For some reason, I'd mucked up the language everyone spoke, but I'd left the statues looking like the previous Goddess.
Actually, digging up the relevant memory, it was completely deliberate. I'd figured I could get away with changing the language, but if I'd changed the statues, the old mortal me would have spotted what was up instantly. Damn future me, messing around with past me like a toy.
Of course, I could just shape-shift into something resembling what they thought their Goddess looked like, but I didn't want to. Scales were better than feathers, and no way in heck was I getting rid of my tail. In fact, as soon as I found the time to experiment, perhaps I'd add some more. And some fluffy ears. Nine-tailed foxes were a thing, right? They weren't supposed to be scaly, but who cared? I make the rules now.
The spinneret on my bum could go, though. Another act of will was all it took for it to fold back into my body. The silk glands in my fingers could stay. They weren't visible, and dupliKatie would be most upset with me if I removed them, even if I could just magic up silk from nowhere instead.
"You can stop praying to me; he's already healed," I commented, walking up behind the priestess. She spun around in shock. It wasn't anyone I knew, and she was low ranked, but she'd still do. "I'm about to teleport all the kidnap victims who are stuck in the human territory back over here. Please can you look after them? Some will be in bad shape, mentally."
"What? Who are you?"
"No idea. I haven't decided yet."
I located each of the demons in human territory. Almost all were fox-kin. It was logical for the humans to favour slaves that had a similar appearance to them. Who would want one of the overly limbed blobs as a maid, for example? Or a whore?
No, actually... I really shouldn't ask that second question. There were plenty of humans who would.
Despite finding them all easily enough, I instantly slammed into another complication. A few of the fox-kin victims were happy. Not any of the ones Craig kept, but a few of the ones that had been sold off. There was a collector of exotic wares who used a male as some sort of tour guide when showing off his collection. A female in use as a nanny to a kid who had as much of a thing for fluffy tails as I did. Another female who had been taken as a concubine.
That last one in particular was dodgy as heck, but he did seem to be treating her well, so who was I to judge her preferences?
There was a point of commonality between the three, though; none of them had family or close friends left on this side. In the fox-nanny's case, that was because the kidnappers had killed her husband during the attack, but the others hadn't had anyone to start with. Their opinions on their captivity would no doubt differ were that not the case.
I suppose that meant I couldn't just wave my hand and grab them all, but I could still grab the other twenty. I did so.
The temple suddenly contained an order of magnitude more fox-kin than it had previously. Alas, the amount of summoned clothing was nowhere near sufficient to cover the summoned fox-kin, with the only body part that was reliably wrapped being their necks. Another wave of my hand and twenty broken slave collars fell to the floor.
I felt the relief, saw the tears and heard the cries, but dealing with them wouldn't be my job. I had some places to set on fire. Also, some people.
Leaving them in the care of the overwhelmed priestess, who I hoped would rather swiftly summon backup, I teleported myself to Craig's city, hovering in the air above his ostentatious mansion.
Ha, I could hover now! I didn't even need to flap my wings. I could replicate the demon lord's pinned-in-the-air stunt. And I could teleport to places I'd never been before, too. This was complete and utter cheat mode!
One other ability I'd always turned down in favour of alternative options was spell casting. I had the options of picking mage classes or the affinity skills from my monster tamer class, but hadn't. Oh, how times had changed. A magic circle built up in the sky, almost identical to the one responsible for my first death outside of the dungeon, the only exception being scale. This one spanned the entire city and beyond. I could sense some amount of activity below, people rushing around, presumably trying to work out where their fox-kin slaves had gone.
The activity predictably picked up as my spell circle lit up and expanded, people rushing to the windows to see what the heck was going on. Pedestrians on the street looked up at me, so I waved back. A couple of mages pondered whether to make an attempt to stop me before nopeing out of there. Or, at least, trying to. The barrier I'd erected around the city blocked their teleportation.
The spell ignited, flooding the city with a blinding light.
"Judgement."
Less than a hundred casualties within the city. Hardly any, but I'd set a very coarse net. I was here to deal with the kidnappers, not to impose my vision of morality on humanity. Besides, watching Craig melt was satisfying, even without further casualties. Most of the others that were hit seemed to be the bandits themselves.
I threw a few half-hearted fireballs at the manor and whorehouse, just to make it clear why I was unhappy, before teleporting away. This time I found myself in a gaudy hall, with items of jewellery, weapons and pottery displayed on glass covered pedestals. The wall was lined with paintings, the contrasting styles revealing the range of artists that produced them. I ignored the lot of them, as well as the surprised guests and tinkles of smashed glass as some of them dropped their drinks.
I was surprised the event was still going on, but the hall didn't have any windows. They'd missed the light show, and apparently it hadn't targeted anyone in here. A good sign.
Ignoring the humans, I clicked my fingers, and the collar fell from the neck of a fox-kin, dressed in a suit. Then I noticed his face and burst out laughing. Apparently, I could still be caught by surprise. I'd been poking around inside of his head, but hadn't even looked up his name, or any memories that involved mirrors. Ja'yakril. Or rather, just Yakril, now.
"I'm here to rescue everyone the human bandits kidnapped, but unless I'm very much mistaken, you don't particularly want rescuing?"
I'd once been expecting seeing him in a slave collar to be gratifying in some way, but now, after all that had happened, it wasn't. At all. Not that he seemed overly bothered by it. It hadn't really been doing anything to start with. The irony of the collector ending up as part of a collection didn't escape me, either.
"I... What... How?"
"Hey! Who are you?" shouted a human.
People kept asking that, and I still hadn't the foggiest how to answer. Human or demon. Mortal or Goddess. A chimera of them all. A Katie.
Oh, right. There had been that skill I'd been offered a while back. Named.
"I am [Katie|Princess-of-Undying-Laughter|Aberrant-Monster-Tamer|Realm-Walker|Ascended-Goddess|Chimeric-Human|Bondage-Aficionado]."
The group, humans and Yakril alike, stumbled backwards as if shoved. Many of them were bleeding. True Names weren't something that should be so casually uttered, but if I'd answered with 'your Goddess' in English, there was no way they'd have believed me.
Nevertheless, I didn't want to be responsible for deafening anyone or driving them insane. Another act of will healed everyone back up.
"Does that answer your question?" I asked. "And if you happened to hear anything about bondage in there, you just imagined it. Understood? Just. Imagined. It."
The group nodded, too terrified to speak. Alas, a True Name was, well, true. I couldn't remove elements from it without removing them from myself too.
"Good. Then I'll be off. Just make sure you pay him a fair wage and don't treat him as any less than human. And no slave collars. Horrible things. But on the bright side, he's a lot rarer than he was a few minutes ago, so I'd say that overall, you came out on top."
The same sort of scene played out on my next two visits. The nanny had obviously imprinted on the kid, having failed to have children of her own. The concubine... definitely would have picked the perverted masochist class, if put in my position. She'd sought out the kidnappers, so by the standard definition, hadn't actually been kidnapped in the first place. Craig had sold her off because her eagerness had freaked him out, which was certainly a defence against him I'd never considered.
To each their own, I suppose. Since I had a thing for fox-kin's fluffy tails, what right did I have to complain about a fox-kin who had a thing for humans?
The fox-kin sorted, it was time for the big split. I teleported myself to the fortress of Muigal Pass, hovering once more in mid-air. It was manned fairly heavily despite the lack of war. Perhaps the local nobles were expecting trouble as a result of their actions, or perhaps they were always on guard. At least the equipment that had been used to funnel extra mana into the barrier didn't exist yet.
How should I do this without breaking too much? Rather than splitting the world, duplicating it seemed simpler. Demons would go to one copy, humans to the other, and wildlife to both. Aside from the three demons that needed to stay on the human side, it was a clean divide. That way, I didn't even need to worry about mucking up the weather.
A click of my fingers was enough to carve one world into two. From my point of view, I could see into both. I was in both.
A cadre of mages flew up to me, sparking with mana and power, coming to capture the threat that had appeared in the sky. I glanced at them and shut their power off, catching them as they fell from the air, and placing them gently back on the floor.
"I admire your bravery, attacking your own Goddess," I spoke into their minds, "but you might want to save your strength for softer targets. Also, tell your commander that you're guarding nothing. I have relocated the demons into a world of their own. You and they can interact no longer."
The mages stared in disbelief, but this one they had hard evidence for. It wouldn't take them long to confirm that the demons really had gone from the other side of their defences.
That left me three more tasks. Keeping my momentum going, I crossed to the site of the human capital in the demons' world. Once again, I reached out into the Void, listening to the echoes within. What once was, will be again. Or, more accurately, what would have been later will be now. Possibly. English tenses weren't built to deal with time travel.
"Dru'niryeal, Sru'taklin, Mru'walyn, Jru'belem, Kru'tapet," I greeted in turn as I took the idea of their existence and gave it Form.
Sru'taklin looked around wildly before dropping to the floor, desperately clutching it as if he was worried he was about to fall into the sky. Mru'walyn boggled at me, dropping into a combat stance. Jru'belem and Kru'tapet were looking around in confusion, although both were careful not to accidentally look upwards. Dru'niryeal stared at me in just as much confusion, but hers was soon wiped away by something else. She dropped to her knees, a huge, dopy grin on her face. A non-zero quantity of drool was visibly leaking.
Oh, crap. Her not-completely-sane levels of zealotry were directed at me now. That was... disturbing. Did I get a prayer screen? Some sort of spam filtering software? Maybe I could hire a secretary? Another problem for future me. Since future me had been such a dick to past me, I deserved some revenge.
"Welcome back," I said, swishing my tail in a way I hoped was reassuring.
Kru'tapet was the first one to remember that words existed. "What happened? I can't believe we survived that light, whatever it was."
"You didn't. Thankfully, I've grown powerful enough to resurrect more than just myself now."
"And the humans?"
I gestured at the bare earth we were stood on, the outlines of structures still visible. There were even pits where foundations used to be for the more carefully constructed buildings. "Welcome to their capital. Population; zero."
"They're dead?! You killed them all?"
"Nah, I sent them all elsewhere. They're safe. Just forget they ever existed."
"What's going on?" asked Mru'walyn. "You killed me. Even if you have somehow gained the power to resurrect others, why would you resurrect me? And where are we?"
"Guilt? Justice? A general desire to be able to make choices without worrying about the consequences? Who knows?"
"Justice? What, you resurrected me just to put me on trial?"
"Hell no. The opposite. I know what your motivations were. You were doing your best to save your people, and didn't wish me pain even after what I did to them. There would be no justice in letting you die for that. And I suppose congratulations are in order for succeeding; I doubt we'd be here right now if not for you. Not only have you successfully escaped the destruction of your old pocket world, but not too many people can claim to have had a hand in creating their own Goddess."
Mru'walyn blinked and cast an investigative soul magic spell at me. Then he blinked again, glanced at Dru'niryeal, who was still grinning and by this point wasn't looking a hundred percent conscious, opened and closed his mouth a few times without anything comprehensible coming out of it, then fell to his knees too.
Jru'belem and Kru'tapet followed him. I couldn't say I was too keen on having people bowing to me, but I did make them. Twice, eventually, even if I'd only done it once so far.
"So you intend to bring back everyone?" asked Kru'tapet, who seemed to be the most adaptable one here by far. "I suppose you raised us first so that we could prevent panic in the others."
"Yeah, pretty much. But I should arrange some accommodations first."
I waved my hand behind us, raising up a copy of their dungeon town.
"Wait!" yelled Mru'walyn. "How did you do that? There was no expenditure of mana. You can't just create something out of nothing."
"Theoretically true, but the Void has infinite potential, so for all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter."
"The what? How? This makes no sense! You aren't following any of the laws of magic!"
"Goddess, remember," I said with a shrug. "Besides, I'm pretty sure I wasn't following any laws even when we met the first time. Anyway, people."
I waved my hand again, resulting in a few thousand very confused fox-kin appearing. Some of them started screaming, or crying, or following Sru'taklin's example and grabbing tight hold of the ground in case gravity suddenly reversed. I probably should have dug out some caves for them, rather than summoning them on the surface, but giving them the site of the humans' capital had seemed poetic somehow.
I wasn't sure why I kept with the hand waving, though. It wasn't a necessary part of proceedings. It just made me feel better.
And then I saw a face I recognised and felt a lot worse again. It wouldn't have hurt if I'd accidentally missed a few when resurrecting them, would it? Too late now, though. People had seen them.
And then my grin returned as I remembered what I had in my dimension home, stashed away and hardly ever used.
"Hi again, Si'janrii!" I called, teleporting over and ramming a cursed ring of gender reversal onto his finger before he could react, watching in amusement as he lost ten centimetres of height and his hair and breasts grew out. "Looking good!"
"What? You?" he gasped, looking down. "Where am I? What did you just do?! Didn't I just..."
"Die? Yes, you did. I brought you back to life, you thankless nitwit. And then I robbed you of your manhood for a second time, because you seriously don't deserve to keep it."
Alas, I only had one more of the rings, and there were at least two more people I wanted to use them on; Si'chieen and So'layn. Oh, right, I was as forgetful as Mru'walyn. I was the damn Goddess! I just duplicated the remaining ring a few times.
"Mum! Dad!" yelled another familiar voice, distracting me from my forced feminisation project. "You came back!"
I turned to see the dungeon's version of Ancora running towards a pair of adults I didn't recognise. Perhaps I should have made more effort to respawn families together, but when I'd never met them, and they hadn't died anywhere near each other, it was hard.
And then Ancora stopped short. "You... You aren't still mad at me? You aren't going to bite me again?"
I winced. How easy it would be to just wipe their memories. But as I watched the parents hug their child, weeping, I felt proud of myself for resisting the urge.
Perhaps finding out what had happened since she died would help Dru'niryeal stop being quite so... Dru'niryeal.
"Right, one more down, two tasks left to go," I commented, mostly to myself, deciding it was time to leave this group to their own devices. I'd made sure their homes and storehouses were well stocked, and there was enough wildlife around for them to hunt. They had enough to survive.
That was all I needed to do here in this world. So I left it.
In a space between spaces, in the infinite Void, I floated. A school of eels swam by. Or at least, from one perspective, it was a school of eels. As I paid attention, I noticed that each eel was, in fact, composed of eels, and while I was a bit close to get a good look, wasn't the school also in the shape of an eel? The entire construct paused and twisted, an eye made of eels blinking at me.
"OH! SOMEONE NEW!" it said, despite the complete lack of air or any other medium through which sound could travel. Telepathy? The black dragon sounded kinda similar, albeit not quite so loud. "DO YOU WANT TO BE MY FRIEND?"
"Maybe later?" I hazarded, not entirely sure where Goddess came in relation to Giant Void Eel Thing on the pecking order. "I have a couple of things I need to do first."
"AWW. LATER THEN."
The collection of eels darted off somewhere, leaving me alone. I could see the black dragon's point about not wanting them around in his world. It wasn't that they were hostile, just that they were... other. And also big. I could imagine one of those voidlings could cause a lot of damage simply by trying to be friendly.
Left alone again, it was time to create heaven. Or at least, a place for me to stay where I wasn't going to accidentally fuck the world up by sneezing. I had the same problem as the Void's natives. I'd simply grown too other to be compatible with such concepts as physics.
Pinching off a section of the Void into a new universe, I made myself a small hut set in the middle of an infinite meadow. My dimension home, but anchored well away from any other worlds, and without the constraints of the skill. And then I demolished the hut and replaced it with a castle, because Goddess. If I couldn't be ostentatious now, when could I? And, with a safe place to stay all set up, it was time to fulfil my penultimate promise. I let the glowing golden ring appear in my hand, and then crushed it, spinning a new body for the mind within out of nothing, and filling in my more recent memories as I did so.
"Took you long enough," said dupliKatie. "And gargoyles? Really?"
"Oi, tone down the cheek. I'm a Goddess now, I'll have you know."
"Yeah, so I saw. This explains so much. Now we know why that dungeon world made no sense whatsoever."
"And what's that supposed to mean?" Why did I bring my clone back if she was just going to mock me?
"For all you complained about it, I don't once remember you claiming you could do better."
"Don't make me seal you back into that ring."
"Oh? Are you sure you want to threaten something like that? It might make me mock you more. Besides, you just broke it!"
I smiled, glad that there was at least one person who wasn't going to bow to me, or start acting all reverential. Yes, that person was me, but it still counted.
Speaking of my duplicates, that led me to the final task I needed to carry out. Now, where was Earth? And what date had it been when I'd first kidnapped myself from my bed, with only a nightie to my name? This time around, she'd have a very different experience.
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And that was the final regular chapter. Wednesday will be an epilogue from Earth-Katie, then there’s three what-if alternate endings.
Comments
cathfach
She forgot. She also forgot about the captive she has in her dimension home. Maybe she'll remember one day, and when she does, she has time travel at her disposal, so it doesn't matter how long it takes.
cathfach
Of course not. Melting the brains of my patreon's would be a poor financial decision. :p
Andrew Meyers
Did she actually put the extra rings on Si'chieen and So'layn, or just intended to and forgot? It seems unfair for them to get off without any punishment while only Si'janrii got his punishment.
Yuval Roth
Read her story, a friendly voidling, the other void beings think this adorable eel thingy is a weirdo, so she makes friends after an idiot summons her.
sqeesqad
I love the idea of terrible monster beyond human comprehension just wanting to be friends
MinE
I just remembered you never did tell us Anya's true name.
MinE
Laughter and Monsters too
MinE
plus her pet murder tree. She's not exactly an aberrant monster tamer with only one monster.
MinE
I hope she brings back Queenie. If her children are brought back aswell; she'll not hate Katie as much.
Lictor Magnus
Katie, goddess of creation, balance, and bondage 😂
Vorquel
Good friendly voidling reference
