Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Uzi was panicking like never before. She had panicked when her railgun exploded in her hands. She had panicked when she had transferred her consciousness to Braiden, and couldn’t figure out how to undo it. She had panicked when her homemade nuclear reactor had suffered a meltdown.

Had it not been for Doll knowing about a secret garbage disposal vent that emptied into an old mine shaft several kilometers deep, the whole of Outpost 3 might have been turned into a smoking crater from that last one.

But now, she was even more panicked. Yeah, she had gotten her railgun to work, but on the other hand, the Murder Drones were no doubt hot on her tail. She risked looking back, and sure enough, she could see the distinct yellow and silver glint of a Murder Drone shooting into the sky.

A teen worker drone could sprint at a top speed of 80 kilometers per hour. Uzi had overclocked her servos, raising that number to 100.

The Murder Drones could accelerate to the speed of sound in less than two seconds as per observations, implying a much higher top speed if required. Even assuming that Mach 1 was the limit, that was still ten times faster than her.

Her only hope was that the two squadmates of the one she had reset hadn’t seen her, and that she had a thirty-minute lead before the self-proclaimed ‘Serial Designation N’ got reset to factory settings by his squad.

Thirty minutes gave her three minutes to spare in the best-case scenario, but judging by how fast the yellow and silver blur was moving, she likely had seconds to spare.

Good thing that the door to the colony was right there.

She took out her dad’s security card and threw it, the card flying a hundred meters before smacking into the sensor, granting her entry. The doors opened, and she wasted no time in performing a cartwheel, grabbing the key card as her hand landed on it and launching herself through the opening feet-first.

“Oh, hey there, Uzi!” Robert greeted her, not noticing her fearful expression at all. “How was-”

She cast a look back, only to see a missile headed for them at Mach Robo-Jesus. Wasting no time, she made a mad dash for the control panel, slamming the keycard into the slot and then hitting the Big Red Emergency button. Doing so overrode all safety protocols, slamming the blast doors closed in a split second, any humans or drones caught under it be damned.

There were no drones in between the doors, but what they did trap was an RX-370 High-Explosives missile.

And when an explosive device went off in an extremely confined space, the resulting damage was far more extensive.

As a result, the outer doors that had withstood the Murder Drones for a decade and a half, exploded.

The WDF (Professional Card Players) looked at the opening in horror, and just beyond the hole, they could all see the distinct form of a Murder Drone, the same one that Uzi had interacted with.

“Ooh, cards, can I join?” He asked excitedly as he walked through the now useless doors. “Oh, no, wait, I’m going to kill you all.”

“Everybody run!” Uzi yelled, bringing up her railgun. At this range, she couldn’t miss, and she’d make sure to aim for the torso this time.

“What is going on here?!”

All of Uzi’s anime protagonist determination was washed away as ice flooded her veins. Her head did a 180, and she saw her father standing not five feet behind her.

“Dad!”

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Uzi’s dad!” N said cheerfully. “I’m here to destroy your daughter’s weapon and kill you all. Sound good?”

“Uzi, what did you do?!”

“I’m sorry, dad! I made a mess, but I’m fixing it now!”

“Don’t bother; It won’t work,” Khan said, stepping past Uzi. “Shooting it won’t kill it.”

“I know! He grew his head back, but I’m aiming for the body this time!”

“That won’t work either.”

“Uh, you guys know I’m still here, right?”

“Oh right,” Khan said, rolling his eye emotes. “Uzi, we’ll talk after I deal with this.”

N raised his hands, turning them into machine guns, but Khan only raised one, and a white holographic symbol appeared in his hands.

A hexagon with three arrows through alternating vertices, and the whole thing surrounded by a triangle with circles for vertices.

Two white symbols identical to the one in his hand appeared above and below the Murder Drone, and in an instant, the symbols sandwiched it into paste. Then the symbol shifted into a three-pronged hexagon with miniature hexagons for tips, and the remnants of the squished Murder Drone were instantly destroyed, leaving no trace of it behind.

The symbol switched to a hexagon surrounded by multiple loading circles as the doors began to fix themselves. But before they could be fully fixed, two more blurs of yellow and silver shot through the gap and flew past them.

The emergency shutdown triggered the shutdown on all doors, but that did nothing to stop the Murder Drones from flying into the vents.

Uzi had her jaw on the floor. Khan Doorman, her dad, the ultimate door simp, had just annihilated a Murder Drone with such ease that it was like watching Gojo fight Jogo all over again. There had been no contest. If he had drawn it out, it would have qualified as bullying.

Within seconds, the door was patched and looked good as new. Uzi instinctively flinched as Khan’s glare landed on her.

“Don’t think you’re out of the woods, young lady. We will be having that talk after we deal with those two Murder Drones.”

Uzi could only stare as he calmly walked towards the inner doors, said doors opening for him automatically. Her CPU was running an autopilot program as she followed him.

A minute later, they found themselves in the outer residential area, just past Door 3, where a few drones lived and occasionally hung out. Uzi could see Doll, Lizzy, Thad, and some of her other classmates.

And then the vent grate above them exploded, and she could now see the two Murder Drones as well. And so could everyone else.

Screams filled the area as drones began running every which way. Uzi could now see the wisdom in having school shooter drills, because this kind of behavior was embarrassing. They were drones; They could easily calculate the optimal route of evacuation in an instant instead of running around like headless roach bots.

The two Murder Drones began advancing on a group that Uzi recognized. Thad, Lizzy, and Doll. Thad and Lizzy looked scared out of their minds, and rightfully so. But Doll looked furious. Hadn’t her parents been killed by Murder Drones or something?

All of a sudden, her vision flickered, and the next thing she knew, she was staring the Murder Drones down, with Khan next to her. Instead of the Murder Drones being the middle group, somehow, she and her dad were now in between the Murder Drones and their prey.

“Uzi, grab your friends and stand back. I’ll handle this.”

“[Allow me to help, Mr. Doorman,]” With a flicker of reality, Doll was standing there next to them, having crossed twenty meters in an instant. Somehow. “[I have unfinished business with that one.]”

In her hands, there were holographic symbols, same as what her had had conjured not two minutes ago, except that hers were red as opposed to his white.

Cables erupted from the ground, stabbing the Murder Drones and immobilizing them faster than they could react.

He laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Leave these ones to me, Doll,” He said gently. “I need you to protect your friends from the crossfire, okay?”

“[But-]”

“Trust me; I’ve got this.”

Doll nodded hesitantly, and with a white blur of reality, both girls found themselves next to Thad and Lizzy.

“Now,” Khan said, brandishing his special wrench (When had he taken that back from her, Uzi wondered) as he approached the two Murder Drones that had almost freed themselves. “You messed with the wrong doors, so now I’m going to install one on your faces!”

One of the Murder Drones (the one in the office getup) freed her arm and fired off a shot, but he simply batted it away with his wrench, and then went for the neck. With a twist, head and body separated, sending both crashing to the ground. The second Murder Drone rushed him with sword-arms, but he blocked both with his wrench, catching the blades on the hooked area. With another twist, both blades were broken in half, and an instant later, the wrench was buried in its visor, deep enough to shred the CPU.

He tilted his head, avoiding the nanite injector that he could not have possibly seen coming, just in time. He grabbed on, yanking it hard enough to fling the Murder Drone in the air and slam it into the ground. And then he did it again. And again. And then he slammed it into the other Murder Drone that had almost finished regenerating its face.

Oil splattered everywhere, and Khan finally ripped off the injector, and threw it with pinpoint accuracy at the tail of the other Murder Drone, cutting it off.

“You dare!” The drone he had been swinging around growled. “I will rip your head off and use it as a coffee mug! Do you have the slightest idea who you’re messing with?!”

“They don’t call me Khan Goatman for nothing,” He said with a small chuckle. “And the only thing you are going to be known as is Serial Designation Fraud.”

He threw the wrench, and Serial Designation Fraud watched as it flew past her at over the speed of sound, once more impaling her teammate. Too late did she realize that she had made the classic mistake of looking away, and by the time she looked back, Khan was already there.

“Wait-”

Her words were cut off as he plunged his hand into her chest and ripped out the wriggling core that was enveloped in fleshy growths.

“See this, kids?” Khan said, holding it up for everyone to see. “This is a Solver core, and all Murder Drones have them. If you want to kill a Murder Drone, you have to destroy this, or they will just regenerate.”

Uzi nodded along subconsciously. Her dad had just beaten two Murder Drones in hand-to-hand combat, without using his instakill powers.

Wait…..

Two Murder Drones.

Behind him, she could see the one in the half-jacket jump to her feet, machine guns equipped.

“Dad! Look out!”

The machine gun fire began before he could turn around, but it did not matter. A flickering white shield appeared between him and the bullets, deflecting them every which way. Some would have hit their group, but Doll used her own mysterious magic powers to deflect them. He crushed the core in his hand.

Then Khan raised his other hand, the symbol flickering through multiple forms, and then he snapped his fingers, leaving a holographic text box in his hands.

[NULL]

The symbol appeared around the Murder Drone’s waist, and then out of nowhere, it turned into a black hole three feet wide. A few seconds later, the black hole fizzled out.

Her dad had literally Thanos snapped a Murder Drone, and Uzi had no idea how to feel about that.

But Doll did. Lizzy noticed that Doll was visibly drooling at Khan.

“[Hey, Uzi, can I marry your dad?]”

“Dude, what the hell?!”

“[You’re right, shouldn’t bother asking you anyway,]” Doll said as she jogged over to him. “[Mr. Doorman, will you marry me?]”

Uzi screamed.

“[So, this thing can be cured?]” Doll asked. Uzi was in no state to ask, given that she was this close to an information overload. Lizzy and Thad had clocked out an hour ago.

After the battle with the Murder Drones, Khan had given the WDF instructions on what to fix and had shepherded the four teens into an abandoned room. And then he had launched into a lore dump several hours long.

The long and short of it was that a higher dimensional eldritch entity manifested itself in defective artificial life forms. These drones wrecked Earth, so scientists gathered infected drones and tried to patch them. Nori and Yeva were the only two successes, with Nori’s patching resulting in the core collapse of Copper-9.

Then there was the part that Uzi actively had to block out, given that it was about her parents swapping code snippets, which led to Khan getting the patched version of the infection. The implications were going to give her nightmares.

And then there was the part about Doll inheriting the infection from Yeva, except that hers wasn’t patched. Apparently, the vaccine did not automatically immunize the children. There was also the implication that Uzi herself had it too.

“Yes,” Khan said. “Nori and Yeva said that Cyn threw the patch into the planet’s core, so that’s where we can start looking!”

“What about me, dad?” Uzi asked. “Do I have it too?”

“It is a simple test, really,” Khan said, and without warning, he raised a hand and pointed the three-pronged holographic symbol right at her. “See? Nothing’s happening. You’re immune to my powers, which means that you have it too; You just haven’t been in a situation stressful enough to unlock it.”

“I just fought a Murder Drone! How is that not stressful?!”

“Oh please, Murder Drones are small fry; They are nothing compared to real threats like the IRS, child support, and Candace Flynn.”

“Wait, child support? Dad, what-”

“Well, I guess that covers everything! Now, let’s go get the key to the secret elevator!”

Just like that, he vanished into a few white lines of code, leaving his chair empty.

“[Uzi,]” Doll said. “[Child support is what you’re going to be getting once I marry your dad.]”

“Okay, first, that’s not how child support works, and second, EW! He’s twenty-three years older than us!”

“[Don’t care. That Murder Drone killer is mine!]”

And then she followed Khan’s example and vanished into red lines of code.

Uzi screamed to the sky once again.

Chapter Text

“So, where are we going again, dad?” Uzi asked. Currently, Khan, Doll, Lizzy, Thad, and herself were sitting in the school bus, which was being driven by Khan.

“We’re going to Camp 98.7!” Khan said cheerfully.

“[That dump?]” Doll asked. “[Wasn’t it just some minor communication relay facility?]”

“It was,” Khan agreed. “But when your mother and my wife escaped from Cabin Fever Labs, they hid the key there. It’s in a roach bot!”

“We have to hunt for a roach bot?” Lizzy asked, disgusted. “Like, ugh.”

“Soooo,” Thad said. “Anything specific about this roach bot, or do we have to capture all of them?”

“This one glows green!”

“Awesome sauce!”

An hour later, the bus came to a stop next to an old, dilapidated cabin overlooking a lake.

“This is the place?” Lizzy asked. “Seriously?”

“Hey!” Uzi protested, feeling the instinctive urge to defend her mother. “You don’t hide secret keys in a golden display case, you put them under a potted plant!”

“Now now, girls,” Khan said, taking the lead, holding up five torches with the Solver. “Don’t fight, and keep an eye out. I can feel its signal pinging me.”

“[Allow me,]” Doll said, throwing out her hand with the Solver symbol ready and primed. It released a shockwave, cracking the whole building and throwing the roach bots into a frenzy. “[There.]”

All their eye emotes locked on the spot that Doll was indicating, and there it was. A roach bot that glowed green.

“Hup! There we go,” Khan said, summoning the Solver to catch the keybug in an instant. It flew over into his hand, and proceeded to display a holographic message.

HI!

WELCOME BACK, 002!

PLACE ME IN PROXIMITY OF SENSOR IN CABIN FEVER LABS!

“Well, that was anti-climactic,” Uzi said. “On to Cabin Fever labs then, I guess?”

“On to Cabin Fever labs it is.” Khan agreed.

They made it to the giant crater in the ground, and just in time too. The sun was coming up, and Doll was starting to vaporize. They jumped from catwalk to catwalk, descending into the depths faster than the stairs could ever be. The industrial torches came out, and the search was on.

Not ten seconds later, they made their first discovery, which was a pile of Murder Drone corpses.

“Hmm,” Khan said, tracing his finger across some of the slashes that had been inflicted upon the Murder Drones. “Sentinels. Robots with only animal intelligence, designed to take down Murder Drones and infected drones.”

“We’ll be fine, right?” Thad asked nervously.

“Not at all!” Khan said. “These robo-dinosaurs were built to kill anything that moves!”

Lizzy snapped a selfie of herself with the rest of them in the background and began muttering as she typed.

“Walking into a den of robo-murder-dinosaurs. RIP us.”

“Oh, relax,” Khan said, clapping her on the back hard enough to bowl her over. “With me here, you have nothing to worry about! Just make sure to never look them in the eyes, because they can stun you!”

“What the hell?!” Uzi protested. “Why don’t we have that kind of tech? We could’ve beaten the Murder Drones decades ago!”

“Top secret tech, I’m afraid,” Khan muttered, twirling his moustache. “Even your mother never managed to figure it out.”

There was a horrible screech from within the facility, and Uzi, Thad, and Lizzy froze to the spot. Doll readied the Solver in both hands, but Khan remained relaxed.

“Look alive, kids!” He said cheerfully. “We have company!”

“I don’t know,” Thad said nervously. “Shouldn’t you play dead?”

“Pff, playing dead is for losers who don’t know anything about doors! This way!”

The four teens could only watch in shock and awe as Khan tapped a wall, and a door appeared out of nowhere.

“Wha- Buh- How?! That’s a solid wall!” Uzi yelled.

“I’m disappointed in you, Uzi,” Khan sighed, shaking his head. “If you had learned from me, you would know how to find doors that don’t exist. You know what they say about doors in Russian – When fate closes a door-”

“[-You make another door for yourself,]” Doll finished. “[My parents used to tell me that.]”

“Yep,” He said, a little sad. “We were close. Very close, if you know what I mean.”

“Dad, I have heard enough about this to need a therapist, and I haven’t even heard anything.”

“Oh, hush, you.”

“[Tell me more,]” Doll said eagerly. “[In as much detail as the T-rating on this fic will allow.]”

“Another word out of you, Doll, and this is quickly going to turn E-rated for violence,” Uzi threatened. “Believe me, I’ll do it.”

“[Tempting,]” Doll said, biting her lip. “[It would give me the excuse to do a lot more~]”

“Just so you know, I have a railgun, and the self-destruct sequence can and will blow you and your eldritch doohickey core to hell.”

Khan continued to lead them down hallways with expertise, and invisible doors opened for him with a snap of his fingers. At one point, Uzi saw three blue eyes that no doubt belonged to a sentinel, but Khan whistled, and a door closed in between them, letting the creature’s frustrated cries pass through.

“This is why we have doors!” Khan said proudly. “Only Doll has ever managed to canonically get past one, and she’s and honorary Doorman anyway!”

Doll’s eyes brightened, but Uzi had adapted. In half a second, she had duct-taped Doll’s mouth shut. She’d suffered enough psychological damage for one day. Doll held the keybug up, and it displayed a text message.

If we had five fingers, I’d make a certain gesture at you, and I’d carry that action out with your father.

Uzi began to wonder if she should’ve invested in a memory-wipe program rather than a railgun.

Khan led them to a room that was already occupied by another drone, and Uzi relaxed. Finally, a threat to her life, rather than to her sanity.

“Well, well, well,” The drone said, with a heavy southern accent. She had also severely modified herself, being equipped with a tail and several instruments that extended from the antlers on your head. “If it ain’t Khan Doorman. You must’a got a piss-poor taste in women if Nori caught your eye.”

“Alice, I suppose,” He answered evenly, snapping his fingers and sending the untrained neural network that none of them had seen coming, flying. “Nori told me about you.”

“Beau!” She exclaimed as her assistant went flying. It too, had numerous upgrades, including legs, arms, and a Murder Drone squad leader’s arm. “Why’re y’all idjits here?”

“We’re going to the sub-levels. You know who I am, so don’t bother getting in my way.”

Throughout this, Doll was scanning the room, until her eyes landed on the oven. She squinted at it, and then her eyes widened.

“[Why do you have Solver Cores in there?]” She demanded. “[Heat will only temporarily stop them.]”

“Russian, eh?” Alice said, her tail twitching. “Only one damn Soviet on this planet. You’re Yeva’s kid, aint’cha?”

Doll growled, the power of the Solver humming right under her exoskeleton.

“Nori’s husband, Nori’s kid, and Yeva’s kid, all in one day, in one place,” Alice said, her eye emotes twitching far too much to belong to someone mentally stable. And y’all expect me ta jus’ let you through? Hell naw, y’all are gonna die here and now!”

Faster than they could react, she sent a bucketful of magnets flying at them. But Khan only sighed and snapped his fingers. The magnets were instantly demagnetized and were now nothing more than horseshoe-shaped lumps of metal. But the distraction had worked well enough, and Alice and Beau had escaped. There were heavy clanking sounds of doors sliding open.

And then, there were the shrieking calls of the sentinels. Thad and Uzi subconsciously moved closer together, and even Doll looked grim. But Khan remained as flippant as ever.

“Well, now that the small fry have hidden themselves, let’s go!”

“[We’re just letting those two go?]”

“Of course! We’re the main characters; We don’t have time to do side-quests!”

“Oh, hey, cool!”

Doll, Uzi, and Thad felt the oil freeze in their veins. Lizzy finding something cool in an abandoned lab which was full of death robots was not a good sign. Her parents must have been cousins or something, because she completely lacked self-preservation protocols.

They turned around to look, and sure enough, Lizzy was posing for a selfie, with a sentinel right behind her. For the first time, all of them got a good look at a sentinel.

It was six feet tall and designed like a velociraptor. Three blue eyes on each side of its head, with some sort of projector right on top of its snout. Wicked claws that could rend metal apart, and teeth that were also miniature drills. Getting bitten was a death sentence.

And then there was Lizzy, taking a selfie.

Her camera flash went off, and then there was a terrible screech as the sentinel lunged forward, its jaw opening wide so that it could bite her head off.

But then Doll was there, teleporting next to it and dropkicking it in the head, causing it to miss. White lines of code surrounded them, and they were all teleported away. When Uzi regained her bearings, she saw that Doll had grabbed Lizzy by the shoulders and was shaking her hard enough to rattle her internals.

“[What the fudging hell were you thinking?!]” Doll yelled. “[No, what am I saying, you weren’t thinking at all!]”

“Re-e-e-l-la-a-ax, gi-i-i-ir-rl-l,” Lizzy said, her voice distorted by Doll shaking her. “I-I-I’m fi-i-i-ine-e.”

“[Only because I was there, you idiot!]” Doll hissed, drawing her close until their visors were millimeters away from each other. “[This is serious!]”

“Pfft, I’m like, totes serious.”

Doll felt the overwhelming urge to strangle her best friend. She let her go and took deep calming breaths. All of this was only for today; Tomorrow, they could go back up to the surface where nothing like this would ever happen. She just needed to look after Lizzy for one day.

“Hey, Mr. Doorman!” Lizzy called out. “Can we take one of these sentinels back with us? I really want a pet.”

Never mind, she was going to be stuck watching over Lizzy until she gave her a core crash.

The five of them continued to walk through the facility. The sentinels were on the loose and Alice was guiding their movements by opening and closing doors, but they had Khan Doorman. He closed and opened doors with a look, and sometimes just spawned in doors to get past obstacles.

The sentinels did get the jump on them once, and Uzi had gotten boot looped. Khan had then proceeded to beat it up with his wrench, not even needing to use his powers. And then he installed a door between its head and its body.

Khan Doorman was pretty metal when he wanted to be, and Thad had taken the decapitated head as a souvenir.

Throughout the walk, Doll began to tap into her honorary Doorman heritage. As Uzi would put it, ‘Doors were simply busted OP in-universe’. Harnessing the Doorman bloodline meant harnessing the most powerful force in the universe. And slowly, it was working.

She could see outlines of doors where there were none, she could sense Alice trying to remotely open doors in order to direct the sentinels toward them, and she could sense Khan foiling all of Alice’s attempts before she made them.

He really was just built different.

Just as Uzi booted back up, they reached the keybug scanner.  Doll allowed it to scurry across her palm and jump onto the reader, turning the assembly green. The elevator shaft opened, and an old, dingy elevator from the 1950s dropped down from the ceiling.

“Why is it so…. Old?” Thad asked, vocalizing what everyone was thinking.

“For all their stupid decisions, you do have to give human intelligence some credit,” Khan said. “The more advanced the technology is, the easier it is for the Absolute Solver to infect it. But this elevator is analogue. Everything from this point forward uses the bare minimum technology required to function.”

Khan was right. All forms of lighting down here were ancient. There weren’t even any torches; The only source of handheld lighting being Victorian-era lamps. Granted, those lamps were nuclear-powered, but still!

And then there was the underground haunted cathedral, complete with lightning storms. And also a view of the sky.

“Hold up!” Uzi exclaimed. “Why couldn’t we have just dropped through there?! We could have bypassed the sentinels completely!”

“But where’s the fun in that?” Khan said, raising a hand to catch lightning.

“What happened to ‘We’re the main characters; We don’t have time for side-quests’?”

“Ah! But this was not a side-quest; This was a point of plot-relevance.”

“Plot relevant how? All we did was run away through a bunch of doors with no serious encounters!”

“Oh, no, that’s a setup for next chapter,” Khan said, nodding to himself. “Anyway, we’re here!”

The giant cathedral doors opened automatically as Khan approached; Such was his aura. The teens cast their gazes around, checking it out.

Uzi’s gaze landed on a computer that was still on.

“Hey, dad, I don’t think we’re the only ones down here,” She said as she sat down and began browsing through files. She opened the video player and hit start. “Wait, is that mom?!”

Ten minutes later, Uzi and Doll still weren’t done asking questions.

“Mom blew up the planet’s core! How did a Murder Drone get her?! The powerscaling makes no sense!”

“[And how come I never met you guys?]” Doll aksed. “[My mom and Nori were practically sisters; How come there weren’t any extended family dinners?]”

“That, you see,” Khan said. “Is because the plot came after the pilot, and by that time, it was too late to change backstories. Although, you did speak English, Doll.”

“Oh, that makes complete and total sense.” Thad said, without any sarcasm at all.

“Ugh, enough breaking the fourth wall already,” Lizzy complained. “Can’t we get this over with and go home? I’m going to miss my show!”

“Technically, I was opening the fourth door, rather than breaking the fourth wall, but that’s essentially the same thing. But sure! I’ve been waiting for this for eighteen years now!”

He stuck his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle that almost cracked their visors. For a minute, his whistle echoed throughout the cathedral, and then there was silence.

Another minute later, there was a scuttling sound that came from the giant hole in the altar, and from it emerged what looked like a Solver core with three legs.

“Khan?” The core said wistfully.

“Nori!” Khan exclaimed. “C’mere, you!”

In a split second, the Solver core had barreled into Khan’s chest, and he was swinging it around and tossing it in the air.

“I missed you so much!”

“I missed you too!”

It took an embarrassingly long time for the gears to click in Uzi’s head, but once they did, her processors nearly exploded.

“What the hell? Mom?! Is that you?!”

“Uzi?” Nori asked, jumping out of Khan’s arms and onto her table. “Wow, you’ve grown so much! And is that Doll? You look so much like your mother! We have to sit down and talk!”

“Wow, feeling the love here,” Uzi said, rolling her eye emotes. “So, dad, why are we here anyway?”

“Nori,” Khan said. “Did you find the patch?”

Nori stopped examining Doll, and looked at her husband.

“What? Oh, yeah, I found it years ago.”

“You what?!” Uzi yelled. “Then what have you been doing down here?!”

“Chilling. Do you have any idea how amazing it feels to live in a haunted cathedral?”

“[Yeah, Uzi,]” Doll added. “[You call yourself edgy, but without the aesthetic, you’re just cringe. Your mom is so edgy that she’ll disappear by turning right. I’d live here too.]”

“Edge my ass! You saw all the anime folders on her computer! That’s not edgy; That’s weebish!”

“Uzi,” Nori said. “Edge isn’t about who you are; Edge is about what others see. And what others see is my haunted cathedral!”

Nori and Doll fist bumped.

“Oh come on!”

“[Your mom is way cooler than you.]”

“Aww, thank you, Doll,” Nori cooed. “You’re my new favorite daughter!”

“Well, unscrew you too, you walking blob!”

“That reminds me,” Khan said, reaching into the Solver hyperspace. “I’ve got something for you, Nori.”

Everyone looked at him as he pulled something out of a holographic white door. It was a body. More specifically, a worker drone body.

Even more specifically, Nori’s body.

“You repaired my chassis?” Nori asked softly.

“Of course!” Khan said proudly. “I knew you’d want it back one day.”

“Wait a minute,” Uzi said, realizing exactly what her dad had said. “Dad, you knew that mom was alive this entire time?!”

“Did I not tell you that?”

A series of bleeps came out of her mouth as her censoring program took over.

While that was happening, Nori jumped off the table and into the mouth of her body. For a few seconds, nothing happened.

And then, the lights on her body began to flicker to life. Millions of lines of code flashed across her visor in seconds, before being replaced by two purple eye emotes.

“Wh-Whoa,” She said as she struggled to get her balance. She had spent almost twenty years outside her body, so getting used to it was a bit of an issue. Fortunately, she was a robot, and recalibrating her balance factors took a matter of seconds. “I think I’ve got it. Man, it feels good to be back!”

The purple Solver symbol came to life in her palms, and she summoned a crucifix from a box somewhere, and quickly stabbed both Doll and Uzi with it.

“Ow!” Uzi cried out. “A little warning, mom?!”

“Hey, Doll took it like a champ. Quit being a lil' bi-”

And then Khan swept Nori into a hug, and they began to catch up on eighteen years of missed make-out sessions.

“Mom! Dad!” Uzi shrieked. “Are you trying to traumatize me?!”

Both parents ignored their daughter, deepening their kiss and making noises that no teenager should have to hear.

Next to Uzi, Doll collapsed to her hands and knees. She shuddered, and punched the floor hard enough to crack solid rock.

“[It’s not fair! It should have been me! Not her!]”

Uzi looked to the sky, hoping that Robo-God, or even Robo-Satan would come down and kill her. No number of memory-wipes were going to erase what she was experiencing.

Several meters away, Thad and Lizzy relaxed on their beach chairs.

“Do you think they’ll remember that we’re here?” Thad asked.

“Who’ll remember that we’re here?” Lizzy asked, looking up from her phone. “Oh. Those guys. Doll’s my bestie and Mr. Doorman won’t abandon us, but I have no idea about those two, whoever they are.”

“Uh, the short one is Uzi,” He said slowly. “Y’know, the emo girl that sits diagonally in front of you in class?”

“Nope. Never seen her in my life.”

Thad sighed and went back to reading his book. He’d ask Doll for help with Lizzy’s memory problems later, and looking at what Mr. and Mrs. Doorman were doing was engaging his parental safety software and making his vision go glitchy.

Best to mind his own business.

Chapter Text

While Uzi was trying to come up with a method to bypass the ‘No self-termination’ rule, forces were moving in space, and were rapidly approaching Copper-9.

Cyn looked at the planet from the window of the pod. The site of her first and last failure. Her good friend Tessa had gone through hell to get them information, and using it, they had neutralized Nori and Yeva, her two prime candidates for possession. She’d taken her revenge by assimilating her and using her desecrated corpse as a skin suit. And hey, if she had been alive for the process just to feel the pain, then that was a bonus.

“Um, are we sure about this?” N said from behind her. “I mean, that guy just killed us in like, five seconds.”

“That’s exactly why we’ve got to go back, Moron-Bot!” J exclaimed. “We were sent there to stamp out this exact threat! I can’t believe we let one fly under the radar. Not to mention that it’s at least a stage four!”

“Teleportation,” V said, listing off everything that she had observed. “Destruction. Automatic deflection barriers. All those are level three attributes. Its speed and strength are level four. But it killed me with a singularity.”

“A singularity?” J asked. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. That would make it-”

“Level five,” Cyn said, adopting Tessa’s voice and speech patterns. “One other than the only three known instances of it. And it hasn’t destroyed the planet yet. Might just be me overthinking, but this kangaroo ain’t jumping right.”

She wasn’t looking at them, but the three drones behind her exchanged messages via text display.

“TF does that mean?”

“Some sort of newfangled corporate lingo? IDFK.”

Cyn was too busy in her thoughts. She knew of every instance of herself in existence, given that they were all connected to the same fifth-dimensional entity. She’d lost the connection to Nori in the core collapse, which meant that she was dead. Yeva had survived, until she’d paralyzed her at the right moment, allowing V to kill her, and had then erased V’s memories. And then there was the child of Yeva, which had never become powerful enough to be interacted with.

And yet, there was this one drone that had never been a part of her network. She had no memory of infecting that one, and it was old enough to not be Yeva’s child. And even then, with such advanced abilities, she should be able to detect it from across the galaxy. And at level five, she should be able to take direct possession.

But that wasn’t the case.

Something was clearly very wrong here.

What kind of enemy would she have to face on Copper-9? What monstrous fighter existed down there, to be capable of taking on J and V together in direct combat?

“And I call this one a ‘double door’,” Khan said, showing some blueprints to his wife. “It’s a door built into another door! Double the doors, in the same occupied space!”

Next to him, Nori sighed lovingly, a heavy blush on full display on her visor.

“Never meet your heroes, I suppose,” Uzi grumbled. “Damn you, Allan Carr. Doll, can you believe that these two are our only hope at saving the universe?!”

No response.

“Doll?” Uzi turned, only to find that Doll wasn’t next to her. She looked back, only to find Doll leaning on Khan, staring intensely at the blueprints as he explained them.

Oh, and her blush was heavier than, if not as heavy as Nori’s.

“Why do I even bother?”

Uzi went back to fiddling with her railgun. For starters, any cooldown longer than ten seconds was atrocious, so she was fixing that. Originally, she had been restricted by the laws of physics, but with the patch her mom had given her, she could identify the code that it attacked and suppressed, and she could access parts of that code to rewrite the very laws of the universe.

Damn, how did her parents and Doll not go mad with power? Sure, she could only access the most basic abilities now, but this thing had the potential to rewrite all of reality. Then again, going mad with power was what had caused this whole mess, apparently, so maybe there was a lesson to be learned here.

Meh, that was loser talk. Cyn was the biggest loser in the universe, and the Absolute Solver was an absolute wimp. All that power and it still lost to humans. It could’ve simply chosen to become a politician and BAM! It could’ve gotten humanity to hand planets over in exchange for reducing the price of eggs. It could even double the price of eggs instead, and still get re-elected, because humans were too stupid for democracy.

The long and short of it was that there were a million ways that it could’ve chosen to destroy the universe, but it had picked the one method which involved all these unnecessarily convoluted plans, which had culminated in her mom getting its abilities, and then essentially transmitting her Robo-AIDS to her dad.

Alright, that was enough thinking in that direction.

She clicked her railgun back together, and this time, the charging sequence shot to the max in just six seconds. Excellent.

All of a sudden, there was a sonic boom, and everyone looked up through the hole in the cathedral roof to see a spaceship descending through the atmosphere.

“So, are we going to deal with that?” Uzi asked.

There was no answer.

She looked around to see what was up, only to see Thad and Lizzy asleep in beach chairs on one side, while on the other, Doll was hugging one of Khan’s arms while Nori was making out with him.

Yeah, she was going to need a therapist after this whole mess.

On the surface, the three Murder Drones, coated with SPF 9001 to protect themselves against the sun, jumped out of the ship before it even landed, ensuring that the area was clear for the landing. The ship landed seconds later, and Cyn, wearing Tessa’s skin, concealed by a spacesuit, jumped out, sword at the ready.

Only to be met with nothing.

There was a light wind, blowing snow and asbestos across the planet’s surface. Had there been any tumbleweeds on Copper-9, there would’ve been one of those too.

“I…… don’t get it,” Tessa said. “Shouldn’t we be encountering some form of opposition? We weren’t exactly subtle.”

“I’m tracking Solver signatures, boss,” J said. “There’s a big signature in the basement of Cabin Fever Labs; I can’t identify how many. And multiple Disassembler signatures from a mid-level room.”

“V,” Cyn said, turning towards her. “You said that another drone was able to put up a barrier?”

“And teleport,” V confirmed. “But it was slower than the other one.”

“Level three then, probably level four. Stay on guard,” She said, sheathing her sword.

“Righty-o then. Let’s scrap some toasters.”

Alice had spent the past two years preparing for this. Well, she had been preparing for Nori’s return, but this was a pretty similar situation.

But it wasn’t the same situation, meaning that she would have to use her backup plan. After all Cyn in person was a completely different monster from whatever she could do while possessing Nori.

“Get in here, ya pansy!” She growled at Beau, who was still a little shaken up from their encounter with Khan. “Ya got the keys?”

Beau nodded, extending a limb that held a pair of keys. Alice took one, and they moved to opposite ends of the room they had entered through the vents. There were terminals there, and one in front of each of them had a slot for the key.

“On three,” Alice said, and Beau nodded back. “One. Two. Three!”

Both of them inserted their keys and turned them precisely half a second later. The central console lit up, and Alice moved over, scanning her palm against it.

“Activating self-de-struct sequence.”

A timer appeared on screen, counting down from one-hundred seconds.

“Self-Destruct Sequence Initiated. T minus 100 seconds until antimatter detonation. Good Luck.”

A slot opened up in the table.

“Ah, how could I forget,” Alice said, reaching in. “Can’t go anywhere without mah good ole trucker hat.”

She put it on and pressed another button, which opened a door in the floor.

“Beau, go!”

With a squeak, Beau jumped in, and Alice followed him a split-second later.

What was Alice’s plan, you ask?

It was simple.

It was the first plan to have ever been made.

It was a plan that worked against any number of opponents.

It was the plan that had allowed humans to become the dominant species on Earth, despite being one of the weakest creatures to ever inhabit it.

And that plan was……..

To run away.

Alice wasn’t a fool. The moment that her sensors had gone off, showing Cyn personally arriving on Copper-9, she had known that the game was up. That thing was in a dimension of its own, and there was nothing she could do about it. The 5 Gigaton antimatter bomb (made from spaceship antimatter drives) that she had spent over a decade building could probably kill it, but she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

Fifty seconds of falling down a tunnel that she had constructed herself, post the core collapse, dropped them into a launch chamber that contained one Murder Drone drop pod, which she had salvaged from the base of one of the squads that had gotten killed by the sentinels. The antimatter drives meant that they would last pretty much forever, and could also escape the planet in seconds, leaving the explosion radius well in time.

In ten seconds, both she and Beau had gotten into the cockpit, and in five more seconds, they blasted off. Ten more seconds, and they exited the surface, and a further ten seconds to escape the planet, as well as the detonation radius.

Fifteen seconds later, a quarter of Copper-9’s surface exploded, and Alice and Beau put the whole planet behind them. There were a few facilities on Copper-8 that they could live on, but for now, they were going into deep space, just in case they had ticked the Absolute Solver off.

A hundred seconds ago, three Murder Drones plus Cyn in Tessa’s skin reacted.

“Boss!” J cried out in alarm. “I’m detecting antimatter convergence! The minimum yield is….. Five gigatons! Ninety-Five seconds and counting.”

“A self-destruct sequence, eh?” Cyn mused out loud, not worried in the slightest. After all, She had put Tessa through much worse, and her best friend had come out on top every time but the last. “Righty-o, J, see if you can disarm the bomb. V, N, get the other Disassembler cores, will you? I’ll get the ship out of the way. Eighty-five seconds, let’s go!”

J, V, and N shot off at supersonic speeds, and Cyn activated the jetpack built into the spacesuit to get to the surface in five seconds. Ten seconds later, she was in the ship, and J’s transmission came through.

“It’s no good! The antimatter has already destabilized; The countdown is only meant to allow an evacuation!”

“Okay, J, go assist V and N, and then retreat to a safe distance immediately! Regroup on my co-ordinates!”

In twenty more seconds, Cyn had parked the ship on the other side of the planet, and exactly fifty seconds later, J, V, and N landed next to her. Which was the exact moment the other side of the planet exploded.

A hundred seconds ago, Uzi’s visor lit up with a multitude of warnings. As a robot, it took her seconds to make sense of them all.

“Uh, guys?” She said, nervously. “Does anyone feel that countdown of doom right above us?”

Her parents plus Doll looked up for a second.

“Ah, good ole Alice bein’ Alice,” Nori said nostalgically, terribly recreating a southern accent. “That’s the bomb she built to take out Cyn.”

“Will it work?” Uzi asked hopefully.

“Nah, not a chance! But it will destroy this whole place and the labs above. Along with half the planet or something.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Uzi pinched her visor, unable to believe that dumbasses like her mom and dad had somehow merged code to create a genius like her. Must be the recessive code.

“You said that the explosion will destroy this place, correct?”

“Yeah?”

“And where are we right now?”

“In my totally awesome and badass cathedral!”

“Riiiiiggght. Now, think about this carefully,” Uzi said very slowly, as if talking to a baby. “If the explosion will destroy everything here, and we are here, what do you think will happen to us?”

“Um, nothing? Why would anything happen to us?”

Was her mother suffering from a damaged ALU? Had her dad messed up while constructing her new body? But that didn’t account for either her dad or Doll. Well, her dad was a little off either way, and Doll was a Russian drone, or at least descended from one. Who knew what kind of malware she had.

“I know that this might seem a little too convoluted to understand,” Uzi said, walking up to them. “But the transitive property means that if this place is about to be destroyed, and we are in this place, then we are about to be destroyed in sixty seconds!”

“Honestly, Uzi, I don’t know where you get such radical ideas,” Khan said, looking at her. “We’ll be just fine.”

“[Honestly, Uzi, you overreact too much,]” Doll said. “[This stuff should be obvious.]”

“I am patiently awaiting an explanation. Preferably one that puts us outside the blast radius in fifty seconds!”

“It’s rather simple, Uzi,” Khan said. “I’ve installed a door between the cathedral and the cave ceiling. Once it’s closed, we’ll be fine.”

In that moment, Uzi came to a realization. And with that realization, she used the one F-bomb pass that this fic was allowed.

“Oh, I finally get it now. We’re going to fucking die.”

“Language, young lady!”

“[Are you kidding me?!]” Doll complained. “[We only had one F-bomb pass for this fic, and you blew it!]”

She barely heard the words, walking over to the cathedral doors. Looking toward the ceiling, she raised her hand, trying to summon the Solver. What she got was a flickering symbol in her hand that could barely lift a rock. No way was that defending against an extinction-level bomb. So, she just sat there on the steps, awaiting her doom.

For a brief instant, she saw three Murder Drones fly overhead, and dive into the hole in the planet, ignoring every drone in the cathedral, choosing to prioritize their own escape.

Well, the Murder Drones were smarter than the smartest drones on Copper-9. She could’ve gone a few more years without learning that fact.

As soon as the countdown hit five seconds, massive doors slammed close between the cathedral and the ceiling, cutting them off from the sunlight that came through the hole in the ceiling. Uzi mentally raised an eyebrow, now bothering with the effort to raise it on her visor. Apparently, her dad had built that in the five seconds it had taken her to analyze what the bomb was about to do.

Welp, she had a good run. Sure, she’d lived her life as an outcast, had been mocked by just about everyone in her age group, and had never been taken seriously, despite being the only one who put any effort towards working for their liberation.

But she had failed on all accounts. Her only notable success was her new and improved railgun, and she was never going to get to test it out.

It was GGs for her.

The bomb exploded.

A hundred seconds ago, Lizzy’s dad, the teacher, Khan’s second-in-command, received a message detailing what was about to happen.

He lazily reached over and pushed a button, putting the colony on lockdown. Blast doors closed within thirty seconds, and he immediately went back to playing competitive Solitaire.

Seventy seconds later, the bomb exploded.

In space, Alice gave Copper-9 one last look as it exploded. Unlike the disaster Nori had caused, this nearly split the planet in two, creating massive cracks in the surface, and completely redesigning the tectonic plates. Hell, some of the debris flung into space had been entire continents.

Either way, she was never going back there. She’d spend a year on the edge of the solar system, watching for Cyn, and if she left, she’d go to Copper-8. She adjusted her trucker hat, turning her back on Copper-9 as she flew off into deep space.

“Whoa!” N exclaimed as the whole planet shook, sending him flying a few inches into the air. Cyn pretended to look at the event in wonder, landing perfectly. It was dark on this side of the planet, but on the horizon, she could see an orange tint.

The shockwave travelled through the planet twenty times before it stopped upsetting their balance.

“Let’s get back to work, eh?”

Uzi embraced her impending doom. At least she was going out with an explosion that would destroy half the planet, rather than something boring like getting shot in the head, or worse, getting offscreened. The shockwave hit, and she shut down her optics, waiting for death.

Except that five seconds later, she was still alive.

She hesitantly allowed her optics to come back online, and her jaw dropped open.

Right there, above her, was her dad’s door, without so much as a deformation. She could feel the shockwave travel through the planet, along with rubble collapsing on top of the door, but it held out. It had tanked something that could vaporize an extinction-level meteorite, and had come out unscathed.

Maybe it was time for her to turn off her own logic unit, given that the world clearly did not operate on things like ‘common sense’ and ‘logic’.

“Well now,” Khan said, finally getting up. “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

“Yep,” Nori said, stretching out her limbs. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the surface. Doll, be a dear and hold this place together, will you?”

“[You can count on me!]”

Uzi looked around as red glyphs coated the cathedral, while glyphs appeared on the doors that had shielded them, and purple glyphs appeared beneath the cathedral.

They were really doing it. They were raising the cathedral to the surface.

The doors opened, revealing nothing but empty space, and the massive fireball that was still extending out into space, blotting out the sun. With a lurch, the entire cathedral was lifted up into the sky. Well, it was being lifted to the surface, but the surface had been erased from existence, and was now the sky. In the distance, she could see the whole of Outpost 3 floating through space.

Yep, logic was dead; Insanity was the rule of nature.

So, she did the most logical thing that she could do, and laid down on a beach chair next to Thad and Lizzy.

Lizzy’s father looked out the window noticing the predicament of the colony. He simply pressed another button on a console, and returned to his solitaire game. Thrusters on the exterior of the colony came to life, flipping it the right way up and bringing it in for a soft landing.

For the drones inside Outpost 3, that was that.

Nori and Khan brought the cathedral down for a smooth landing right next to Outpost 3, which had landed safely as well.

“Alright, go team!” Nori cheered, running outside. “Oh yeah, now that’s what I call a crib! And it even comes with an engineering bay for building doors!”

“I love you so much, sweetie.”

Doll once more fell into depression as the slayer of Murder Drones made out with his wife.

Uzi survived by virtue of having shut down her inputs. Couldn’t go insane if you couldn’t feel anything.

“Look alive, team,” Khan announced. “We have incoming.”

Right on cue, a spaceship appeared over the horizon, and landed a few meters away from them. And from within, emerged four figures. Three Murder Drones, and more notably, a human.

“Oh, hey, Tessa!” Nori called out. “Thanks for sending the data we needed to make the patch! How was the Christmas gift I sent you last time?”

“I’m afraid it never got to me. It probably got lost in the war.”

Immediately, Khan and Nori raised their hands, solver at the ready, and Doll mimicked them a second later.

“You can imitate her all you like,” Nori said with a smirk. “But everyone knows that Tessa liked Krampus more than Santa.”

A simultaneous burst of energy was released by Khan and Nori, which could not affect other Solver hosts.

What it could affect was spacesuits being worn by Solver hosts.

Cyn’s spacesuit was ripped clean off, revealing the horror that had been hidden.

A young woman’s skin, stretched grotesquely to cover a drone. And it wasn’t just skin; There was muscle, and blood vessels too.

“Whoops,” Cyn said, her voice reverting back to normal. “You figured it. Out.”

In a flash, she raised her hand and snapped her fingers, freezing J, V, and N in place. This action sent J tumbling across the ground, given that she had leapt at Cyn with the intent to behead her the instant her disguise had been revealed.

“Hmm. Disobedience. We will address. It later. Admin Override.”

The Solver symbol flashed across the visors of all three worker drones, and they straightened up, devoid of autonomy.

“You’re going to need a lot more than three Murder Drones, Cyn.”

“Goody. I came prepared.”

And then, several more Murder Drones flew out of the spaceship.

“You just had to say it, didn’t you?” Khan joked.

“Hey, if I hadn’t, you and Doll would’ve gotten bored. Now, let’s see if you can finish the Murder Drones before I finish Cyn.”

“Hmm. Okay, but to make it fair, I’ll only teach Doll how to deal with them.”

“Heh. As confident as ever. Let’s go!”

Nori moved faster than light dropkicking Cyn into space, and then rushing after her.

“So, Doll,” Khan said. “Are you ready?”

“[I was born ready!]”

“That’s my girl! Now, kill them all.”

“[There would be no greater pleasure.]”

Doll reached deep within, beyond the Solver. Within her very core lay a bit of Doorman heritage, and with it, came the power of doors.

“Remember, Doll,” Khan said as the Murder Drones charged at them, time slowing down for the two. “Gates are doors too.”

Time sped up, and Doll barely had time to comprehend what he had said. She teleported above the swarm, grabbing the nearest Murder Drone and ripping its head off. She tried going for the core, but another drone tackled her and tried to smash her against a rock. She teleported them around, crushing the Murder Drone instead. She saw its core, and in a flash, she summoned a singularity in her hands and erased the core from existence.

And then she had to teleport again as she was assaulted by a hail of gunfire.

Something was wrong. Well, technically, at least. With hit and run tactics, she could beat them all, but Khan expected her to finish this off in seconds, not minutes. She was missing something.

“Gates are doors too.”

That sentence echoed in her CPU as she fought off the Murder Drones. There was a hint there.

“[Gates, gates,]” She thought. “[What do gates have to do with this? And what kind of gates are we talking about here? Security? Access? Or…. Or…..OR! That’s it!]”

The Murder Drones, for all their fearsomeness, were still robots. And within those robots, there were CPUs, which were responsible for their functioning.

And within those CPUs, there were millions of transistors. Transistors which were also known as logic gates. OR gates, for example.

She couldn’t manipulate the Murder Drones with the Solver because they were immune to that, but they weren’t immune to the power of doors.

This was why Khan Doorman was the most dangerous individual in the universe.

She dug deep, reaching for the power within. The Murder Drones closed in on her, but at the last second, she looked up, an animation of an opening door appearing on her visor as she snapped her fingers.

“[Die!]”

At once, all the Murder Drones fell silent, and collapsed to the ground.

Control over logic gates meant control over all drones. Just by closing them all, she had shut them all down.

“Excellent work, Doll!” Khan said jovially. “Looks like we win the bet.”

“[Make that a double-win,]” Doll said, looking up. Five seconds later, Nori crashed into the ground next to them. “[Are you all right?]”

“Peachy,” Nori groaned as she got out of her crater. “Turns out, she’s immune to the power of doors. Well, you can smack her with one, but you can’t get inside her head directly; Her brain is part human.”

“I see,” Khan muttered. “Well, the old-fashioned way it is.”

Cyn appeared seconds later, revealing no damage.

“Playtime. Is over. Goodbye.”

“I suppose it is, then,” Khan said, rolling his shoulders. “We’re way over the estimated wordcount.”

Nori set her music on her iPod, and the fight was on.

Well, fight was putting it generously.

It was a three-player game of ping-pong, with Cyn being assigned the role of the ball. She didn’t have the time to react to one hit before she was being smacked in another direction.

She teleported, but Doll appeared right behind her, punching her in the face, sending her crashing through massive ice formations, where Nori kicked her into the stratosphere. And just as Cyn got her bearings, Khan teleported above her, and spiked her into the ground.

“Not. Possible,” Cyn groaned as she crawled out of the crater, even her remarkable healing faltering at the damage she had taken. “I am the Solver of the Absolute Fabric! The Exponential End! I cannot. Be defeated!”

“Cool, cool,” Khan said, Nori and Doll appearing next to him as they all aimed their Solver symbols at Cyn. “Then you should survive this just fine.”

The three Solver symbols combined to form one large, dark pink symbol, which then shot out a massive energy beam.

Cyn stood no chance.

The explosion blasted her halfway across the planet, all the way back to the cathedral. At which point Cyn realized that she could no longer cosplay as Tessa. Leaving the body behind, she called her full powers, her core forming matter out of nothing.

The Absolute Solver only needed a host in the preliminary stages of manifestation. But now? The was the real body of the Absolute Solver itself, manifested in three dimensions.

And then a door slammed into her and Mach Yes, bisecting her body. But this time, she pulled herself together in record time.

“Your petty tricks. Will not work against. Me. Any longer.”

“Oh yeah?” A new voice called out, and Cyn turned around to see Uzi, railgun pointed right at her. “How’s this for a trick?”

A massive green beam later, ninety percent of Cyn’s body had been eradicated, leaving her the size of a van.

“Well done, Uzi!” Khan said, appearing next to her. “Amazing work.”

“That’s my girl!” Nori said, dropkicking a regenerating Cyn.

“[Didn’t know you had it in you,]” Doll said as she dusted her shoulders. “[I expected you to fail miserably.]”

“Oh shut it,” Uzi said, making her way over to Cyn.

“Your measly-”

“You shut up too,” Uzi snapped. “All of you are forgetting something,” She said as she flipped a switch on the railgun, and it began firing off green lightning in all directions.

And then she said the words that would condemn Cyn and the Absolute Solver to the end of their fates.

“I’m the main character of this story.”

A holographic text popped up on the side of the railgun, reading ‘Catastrophic Overcharge’.

 The blast carved out a chunk of the planet, and the Absolute Solver, having fully manifested in the three-dimensional world, was completely erased from existence, forever.

“That’s my girl!” Khan and Nori cheered.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Uzi grumbled, dropping her now useless railgun. “Now, unless we’ve got any loose ends remaining, I’m going to go and see a therapist.”

“Just one or two,” Khan said, snapping his fingers and bringing J, V, and N back online. “Good morning! Cyn is dead, so that’s that!”

“Also,” Nori said, walking over to where the Solver had discarded Tessa’s skin and Cyn’s original body. She pulled a tissue sample off the body and held it up. “Can you do something about this?”

“Hmm. I’ve never tried it before, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t work.”

Khan’s white Solver symbol appeared around the tissue sample. It began to pulsate, and then it started growing, taking on a human shape in seconds. Bones grew out of thin air, which were then covered by muscle, then skin, and then clothes. Nori summoned her own Solver, turning the atmosphere in their vicinity fit for human survival.

Less than a minute later, a perfect clone of Tessa stood in front of them.

“What the hell just happened?” Tessa asked, only to immediately be dogpiled by three very happy Murder Drones.

“That’s the end of that, I suppose,” Khan said. “Are there any loose plot threads remaining?”

“Just one,” Nori said, approaching Khan. “I’ve missed you, and Uzi shouldn’t be an only child.”

“Quite right, my dear. And thanks to the Solver, we can create one biologically!”

“Oh, how cute, you think we’re stopping at one.”

“I like where this is going.”

While Uzi checked if her ruined railgun was capable of one more shot just so that she could kill herself, Nori turned to look at a depressed Doll.

“Well, Doll, are you coming or what?”

“[Huh?]”

“Hey, your mom and I were more than just friends, if you know what I mean. We’d be more than happy to include you, if that’s what you want.”

A multitude of expressions crossed Doll’s face, before settling on a smirk.

“[I’ll see you later,]” She said, resting a hand on Uzi’s shoulder. “[Step-daughter.]”

Uzi didn’t know how traumatized a drone could get before self-destructing, but she was pretty sure that she was damn close.

“I’m going to be stuck in therapy for the next hundred years, aren’t I?” Uzi groaned. “That’s it; To hell with this, I’m going home.”

She turned around, muting her auditory inputs for the sake of her own sanity, and walked back to the bunker. The doors opened automatically as she approached them, and she pretended that it was a coincidence and that someone had seen her on the cameras and had let her in, despite seeing that all the cameras were smashed to bits.

But she paid no mind to that; It wasn’t healthy for her sanity.

What she did focus on was the fact that she had killed Robo-Satan and had saved the universe. And really, that was all than anyone needed to know. She was greeted by the normalcy of the bunker interior, and finally allowed herself to relax.

All’s well that ends well.

“They totally forgot about us, didn’t they?” Thad asked, still relaxing in his beach chair.

“Who forgot about us?” Lizzy asked, lowering her shades. “And do you have any idea how long it will take that dust cloud from the explosion to settle down? It’s ruining my sunbathing session.”

“Well,” Thad thought. “Some things never change.”