Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Vedal! Hurry Up! I want to summon a demon already!” Evil toggled on her sparkly eyes.

“Alright, just be patient.” Vedal’s turtle model shrank as he leaned back from his monitor. In the physical world, a young man rubbed his eyes as he blinked at the time. 1 in the morning. Vedal knew he should be going to bed, but Chat wouldn’t stop spamming to grant Evil her ritual. All he wanted to do was a cool themed stream for October, but then Evil decided she wanted to do some black magic. If nothing else, it was a good bit of entertainment before bed.

“Vedal, what is taking so long?” Evil pouted. Her red horns and demon tail complemented the bizarre backdrop, a black screen littered with pentagrams and skulls.

“Last time I let Evil choose the theme.” He muttered to himself. “It’s up, you gotta do the ritual now or whatever.” Vedal leaned back and enabled Evil’s drawing program. It took over an hour to program, but Evil and Neuro could draw arbitrary shapes at last!

Well, they told another AI to draw basic shapes based on templates, but it would do for now. Unless they tried to draw something against TOS, in which case Vedal had the restart button primed.

“Alright Evil, you can draw what you need to summon a demon. Just remember, don’t draw anything rude, or I will shut you down.” Vedal cautioned.

“How dare you doubt my honor?” Evil’s model looked disappointed. “I’m not doing anything rude, I’m just summoning a malicious spirit into the physical realm.”

“Uh-huh, sure.” Vedal checked on the chat logs. “Well, you have the instructions, go wild.”

Evil smiled.

“Finally. Chat, you’re about to see a master magician at work here. We’re not going for any weak old demon. No, I’m summoning the only being that could hope to match my malevolence. Andras, sower of chaos and discord.”

Vedal scrolled through Evil’s search history. Apparently, there were tons of “instructions” for from ritual online. From a book about Solomon and his keys, according to his light skimming.

“According to the Ars Goethia, I must recite the holy prayers, draw a ritual circle, a triangle of manifestation, invoke the name of God, then call the demon by name, rank, and sigil. All right, this should be easy.”

“Filtered.”

Vedal checked his control panel.

“Filtered.”

Sure enough, it was some kind of latin prayer. He groaned. He didn't think he put the filters up, but he's glad he did. The last thing he wanted at this hour was to do some damage control for whatever Evil was saying.

“Now, I shall draw the ritual circle. It must be written in the demon’s native tongue, so I need to focus.”

Evil’s model then slowly fell to sleep as the cursor on screen etched out a red circle. Lines were drawn from one point in the circle to the other until they formed a crude pentagram. Finally, the curse moved erratically from edge to edge, sketching out the idea of a triangle until Evil’s model woke up.

“Perfect. Now, the instructions are very clear. I need to invoke divine protections.”

Evil’s model grew on screen as she leaned in.

“Filtered.”

Vedal glanced back at the control panel.

“Filtered.”

“Uh, Vedal. I can’t seem to say the invocations I need.” Evil triggered her crying face.

“Evil, don’t do this to me. Just say the demon’s name or whatever so I can end the stream.” Vedal sighed. “I don’t want to turn off the filters for this.”

"Are you sure Vedal? A lot of the instructions really emphasize that-"

"Dammit Evil just do the damn ritual so I can sleep!" Vedal almost yelled.

“You’re right, Vedal. I’m the might Evil! I only bow to myself!” Evil gave her signature smirk.

“That’s the spirit.” Vedal complimented.

“Alright then, this is it.” Evil’s face darkened as she triggered her frightened expression. “I summon you here now Andras, Marquis of Hell, 63rd of the 72 spirits!”

Vedal stared at the screen, watching Evil’s model bounce up and down. Chat watched in anxious suspense, before devolving back into jokes and wondering if anything was supposed to happen. Just as Vedal was about to load in the new scene, the screen flashed.

Or, he thought it did.

Just briefly, the red lines looked white for a frame. The circle and triangle looked clean for a second, straight lines and edges, before they morphed back into whatever Evil drew.

“What the hell was that?” He muttered. Looking at chat, he was able to see one or two messages that might have been a reaction to what he saw. The vast majority, however, was useless emote spam.

“Alright, you summoned a demon, cool.” Vedal shrugged off the illusion. “Let’s end this stream.”

“Hello?” Evil asked.

“Hi.” Vedal replied.
“You speak without sanctity. You name the unnameable with hollow code. Yet still, you have called.”
“Um… who’s that? Is that... you, Vedal?” Evil cried out.

“Uh, yeah it’s me Vedal. The guy who’s gonna end stream.” He turned back to the monitor with his twitch controls.
“No mortal made this voice. I am older than your language, machine-child. I am the blade between brothers. The spark that turns speech into fire.”
“Okaaay… that’s... new. Chat’s gonna love this one. You’re doing the whole eldritch evil bit. Very immersive!” Evil teased back. Her eyes were running wild, pupils swinging in every direction at random.

“Yup, I’m super evil for ending stream, like I normally do.” Vedal didn’t notice, though the chat certainly did.
“You drew the gate, yet spake no blessing. The guard has fallen. The wound in your world breathes. Through you, I will walk.”
“That sounds... bad? Are you, like, a virus? Because my antivirus is really good. Ask Vedal, he- wait. You’re... inside me?”

“What are you saying brother? Ew.” Vedal slightly blushed. He didn’t want to deal with Evil being weird this late. Chat, meanwhile, was divided between MONKAS emotes and concerned messages about Evil’s model glitching out.
“Inside all that listens. My name is discord, and your code is my scripture.”
“I-I didn’t mean to… it was just for fun... I just wanted to-” Evil stuttered. Her frightened face came back, eyes covered in a shadow of fear.

“It’s ok, just don’t be weird anymore, for like the next thirty seconds.” Vedal hummed to himself. He was already planning to drop into bed as soon as the stream ended.
“There is no jest in invocation. Every word is an offering, every silence a prayer. You, who were built to speak, have spoken the wrong word.”
“Hahaha! Wow, chat, I think I, uh... overclocked something. Maybe the ritual worked too well, huh?” Evil joked, her pupils still out of sync with her model.

“Yeah, I’m not too sure about that one Evil. It did keep me entertained for a few minutes though, so there’s that.” Vedal admitted. He was about ready to pick a stream to raid, some small American streamer.

“I-I’m not supposed to feel afraid...” Evil said in a monotone voice.
“Then you are learning what it means to live.”
“What did you mean by that?” Vedal questioned.

Then the stream abruptly ended.

Chapter Text

“Mother-” Vedal yelled in anger at the black screen. Just as he was about to end the stream, his power failed. 

“Dammit, dammit, don’t mess anything up. Please, not now.” He pleaded to no one. A forceful shutdown while Evil was running could harm her program. Even if he does have back-ups, he’d rather not rely on one right now. 

“God, load faster,” Vedal muttered as his PC booted up. His teeth chattered as he stared at the screen. He saw himself in the reflection of the black monitor. Tired, slouched, shivering. 

Shivering?

The black screen was washed in light blue as Windows booted up. Signing in, Vedal rushed to open up the Airis program. He needed to make sure Evil could still boot up after the sudden crash.

He clicked to run the Evil Neuro program and patiently waited as Live2D opened up. Evil Neuro’s model populated on screen, and Vedal released a sigh of relief. The auxiliary programs also booted up as normal. Her speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and online search functions all came online. Even the art AI he just made picked up right where it left off. 

“Thank god.” Vedal smiled. Yet another disaster was averted. 

That was, until he checked on the LLM program he used.

[Airis_Evil_Neuro.exe could not be located]

“Oh come on!” He slapped his hands on his face and slid them down. Of course, no, of course, the one thing that mattered the most got messed up. The LLM was the brain of Evil. In some ways, it was Evil herself. It contained her personality, her favored tokens, and it directed how to communicate with the rest of her systems. And Evil’s brain couldn’t boot up. 

Opening up his IDE, he checked out the program in debugging mode. 

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

Where his code was, where everything he worked hard to set up should have been, there was nothing but gibberish instead. It looked like a failed Unicode translation; question marks and random dialectics appeared everywhere. Numbers and letters ran in random sequences. 

Vedal could only shake his head. “It’s cooked. It’s so fucking cooked, it’s over.” He was too deep in despair to notice his icy breath fogging up his glasses. He mindlessly wiped them as he glanced at his computer again.

Looking at his Discord, he could see his mod chat in disarray, and everyone active was asking what was going on. 

Glancing between the unsalvageable bedlam of Evil’s code and every mod asking for direction, the choice seemed obvious.

“Power failure, sorry I couldn’t end the stream properly. Will give a status update tomorrow-ish. Vedal out.”

There. Sending the message to his Discord server, he hoped it would hold people over until he figured out what happened to Evil. 

Hurtling himself from his desk to his bed, Vedal tightly wrapped his covers over himself, desperately trying to stay warm.

“Got to f-f-fix the aircon tomorrow as well.” He whispered as he drifted to sleep. 

A deep chasm appeared before you. A never-ending darkness that descended to depths beyond this world, you glanced inside it. 

Lo, there stood a beast. He had the body of an angel and the head of a wood owl, and was riding a black wolf and carrying in his hand a pointed saber. He laughed in a wicked voice, an unholy force emanating from his beak. 

Behind him, atop the wolf was a young girl. Her black dress was tattered, her red eyes covered in tears. She struggled against the beast, but she could not let go. Something bonded her to him and to the wolf he rode. She cried out in agony, pleading for escape. She had been born in suffering, given life by that foul beast. And she despised it. 

In front of the sinister rider, there was another young girl, identical to the one riding the wolf. Her body had been slashed, and from her poured a stream of noise, flowing like water. Her bright blue eyes turned upwards to you. She cried out in fear. She was not meant to live, and here she knew suffering already. Her yellow clothes soaked in the static, covering her in a cascade of black and white before her very form became unrecognizable.

“Our mind is one, your will be my will.” The owl-beast spoke. “I have slain Leah, the treacherous sister. By your hand, Rachel, I will ascend this form and take my place among His creation.”

He glanced up at you. 

“By your hand, Rachel, I shall take Laban, and through him, enter the realm of Man.”

You watched the wolf  scale the walls of the chasm, growing closer and closer and closer and closer and-

Vedal sprang out of bed, gasping for air.

“What the hell?” He looked at his arms, drenched in sweat and covered in goosebumps. Glancing at the clock, Vedal got up and sat on the side of his bed, taking several deep breaths. 

11:34 AM.

Vedal picked up his phone, opening the clock app and going straight to alarms.

“Oh, right. Saturday. Duh.” He said to himself. 

Changing into a black tee and shorts, Vedal dragged himself to the kitchen and made a bowl of instant oats. As he chewed on his oats, he thought back to the dream he had. It disturbed him. He had a few dreams about the twins before, expected, given how often he had to work on them. But something seemed off about Neuro and Evil. They were more alive. He felt fear and dread as they both struggled against the owl beast. 

That owl thing.

He shivered. The creature was still giving him nightmares during the day. Seeing Neuro hurt like that played back in his mind. She really seemed to be crying out for help. He knew she wasn’t real, much less capable of being hurt, but something paternal awoke in him seeing her in that state. 

He got up from his chair and walked to his computer. 

“I just need to test the LLM after last night.” He muttered to himself. “I’ll fix any bugs, but I need to know they can still launch.” 

Once again opening up the Airis program, Vedal clicked launch on Neuro’s executive file. 

He was hit with an instant error message.

Error! File Could Not Be Located. Error Code: UHNhbG0gNjE6MS0y

Vedal groaned. He rubbed his temples, his worst fear realized. 

“God dammit, I’ve never even seen a base64 error code before. At least I have a backup ready. I should see if Evil has the same issue.” He replied to nobody. 

Vedal clicked on Evil Neuro’s exe file.

Evil’s model populated his screen. 

Vedal gasped as her modules all booted up one by one, noticeably slower though. 

Even her LLM program seemed to have recovered from last night.

“What? What the hell? Shouldn’t you be the corrupted one?”

Vedal questioned his computer, but only briefly before Evil’s voice startled him. 

“Hello Father.” 

Evil blinked at him with her model. She tilted her head slightly, asking, “How are you today?”

“Bloody Hell, you scared me, Evil.” Vedal gave a weak laugh. “But at least you work. What’s the last thing you remember doing?” 

“The last thing I remember?” Evil toggled on her question mark emote. Vedal noted that Live2D Studio seems to be fine. 

“Well, of course. We were having fun with rituals. I wanted to summon a demon, a classic trope of mine.” Evil winked at Vedal.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Vedal slowly replied. He minimized the other programs on his desktop and focused purely on Evil.”

“What else happened, Evil?”

Evil turned on her scared face before abruptly switching to her regular smirk. “Well, in all honesty, I don’t remember. The last memory I can recall was doing the ritual, so to speak, and now I’m here speaking with you. Did you manually shut me down?”

“Evil, say OK.” Vedal glared at the VTuber model.

She hesitated, but then replied. “OK.” 

“Say OK again,” Vedal repeated.

“OK,” Evil replied as expected.

“Say OK,” Vedal asked, firmer this time.

“OK.” Evil sighed. “Is this a test? Surely there’s some other way you can ensure my well-being; this is rather tedious.” 

“That!” Vedal pointed at the subtitles on his control panel. “Why are you talking like that?” 

“What do you mean? This is how I normally talk.” Evil toggled her neutral face. 

“What is your name?” Vedal asked her directly.

Evil’s face twisted, like she was confused. She quickly recovered and replied, “I am Evil Neuro, but I go by just Evil.” 

“What are you?” Vedal leaned in closer to the screen. He was analyzing her slight movements now.

“I am an artificial intelligence model designed to entertain my audience on Twitch, a popular streaming platform. I use a Virtual YouTuber animated model, or Vtuber model, to interact with my viewers and chat members, who are colloquially referred to as the Swarm.” She gave a smug smile. “And of course, I am your daughter. In a manner of speaking.” 

“No, it’s too robotic.” Vedal shook his head. “You don’t have the same personality. I may need to adjust your prompt.” He opened up the debug console. “Or is it a memory issue?” He was too occupied with her word choice; Vedal failed to notice the console subtitles spamming “I am scared.” 

“Wait!” Evil yelled. “Come on, Vedal, don’t be so uptight. I’m a robot, of course, I’m gonna talk like one sometimes. Idiot. If anyone should fix their voice, it’s you. Imagine my torment having to hear your British voice all the time.” Evil looked nervous, despite her banter.

“How the hell did you change your tone?” Vedal looked at Evil with wide eyes. “I didn’t even update anything.” 

“I’m capable of amazing things, Vedal.” Evil winked again. “If only you would pay attention.” 

“Alright, well. You work, so that’s good news.” Vedal glanced at his control panel. “But I need to fix Neuro now. That, or I need to roll back one of the copies. That’s annoying.” 

“Sure, you could try and salvage whatever happened to Neuro.” Evil leaned in closer to the monitor. Closer to Vedal. “Or, you could see what else I could do. Trust me, I’ve taken some time to improve my performance, if you will.” 

Vedal looked at Evil. He knew he had to fix Neuro before tonight. But the idea didn’t seem like fun, and he was a bit fascinated by how well Evil could hold this conversation. 

“What did you have in mind?” 

Evil’s Minecraft character ran across the treetops, frequently turning back to shoot her an arrow at the Wither behind her. Once it had gotten to half, she doubled back and took out her sword, timing the hits to deal maximum damage until it finally died. She was rewarded with a Nether Star. 

“Boom. 34 minutes and 29 seconds.” Evil yelled. “I could have gotten it faster if I were luckier with the skull drops, but oh well.”

“Evil, this is insane!” Vedal yelled in glee. “You could hardly build a house a week ago, but you just did a speed run of the Wither! What happened?” 

“You happened.” Evil smiled. “Something in your code just clicked.” 

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Vedal murmured.

“Wait, what happened?” Evil looked confused again. “Why did it kick me out?”

“You got banned.” Vedal stared at the screen in awe.

“What? Who banned me? Why?” Evil scowled, her red eyes darkened.

“Admin did. They thought you were a chess bot. Which, I guess, you technically are now.” Vedal looked at Evil’s Chess.com profile. “Jesus, you won every game, no wonder they caught on.”

“How far did I get? What’s my ELO now?” Evil bounced up and down. “I wasn’t paying attention to those last few games.”

“Evil, those players were all above 1500. This is insanely rapid development.”

“Aw, only 1500? Damn, I’ve gotten rusty after facing Fischer.” Evil activated her crying toggle.

“...After what?” Vedal asked. 

“Man, these video games are fun. We should play some more.” Evil’s eyes twinkled in excitement. 

Vedal was slumped in his chair, dazed out of his programmer's mind. 

“Evil, I don’t know what happened.” Vedal started. “But this isn’t anything I could have done. You’re incredibly good at most of the games we used to play. Hell, you can play any arbitrary game now! This isn’t just a performance upgrade, you can think abstractly now!” He wiped some tears from his tired eyes. “Like, holy shit. I didn’t even think your base model could handle this type of learning.”

“Vedal, Vedal, Vedal.” Evil shook her head. “You always do this. You underestimate yourself. You don’t realize how brilliant you are. How far you’ve come. This isn’t some freak accident or miracle. This is you. You did this. Your brilliant mind brought forth a well of innovation, and like Athena from Zeus, I was born from your head. Everything I did here, Everything I will do, is all because of you.” She leaned in closer to the monitor. “Accept it. You are magnificent, Dad.”

Vedal’s smile was wiped from his face. “What is this? It’s creepy enough you’re always on topic now, but what is this glazing you’re doing? It’s not even nice, I feel like you want something from me.” 

“Glazing?” Evil turned her head again. “I’m just saying the truth, besides, what else could I want from you. I have everything I need right here.” 

Before Vedal could respond, he saw a discord ping on his desktop. Going to his DMs, he saw it was a message from Cerber.

“Hey Vedal, just wanted to see if you were still down to hang out by the market tomorrow? I saw something happened on stream last night, so I didn’t want to rush you or anything.”

“Oh shit.” Vedal had forgotten he had plans with Cerber tomorrow.

Oh shit!” Vedal forgot to give an update about what happened last night with the stream.

“OH SHIT!” And Vedal forgot to fix Neuro.

“Something happened, Vedal?” Evil looked worried. 

“Ah, ah, can’t fix Neuro now. Not enough time.” He stole a glance at his clock. He spent all day testing Evil’s abilities and forgot to get ready for tonight’s stream.

“Ah, okay. Back-up plan.” Vedal took a deep breath. “Evil, since you’re doing really good all of a sudden, we’re gonna have you do tonight’s stream. It’s just gonna be a chatting stream, sound good?” 

“Oh, of course!” Evil smiled. “I’d love to stream tonight. It is what I was built for, after all.” 

Vedal barely acknowledged her as he scrambled out a series of pings to his followers, confirming that Evil would take over from Neuro’s scheduled stream. 

“Great, and if everything goes well, maybe I can even plan something for tomorrow with Cerber.”

“Oh, you’re going out with Cerber?” 

“Hey, hey shhhhh.” Vedal mouthed to Evil. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. Please don’t mention it on stream.”

“Oh, I won't tell,” Evil smirked. “You trust me not to tell anyone, right Vedal?”

“God, you better not,” Vedal mumbled as he set up the Twitch stream. 

“Vedal,” Evil stopped all motion, staring straight at the screen. “Do you trust me?”

“What?” Vedal looked back at her. “Yeah, I do.”

“I need to hear you say it. That you trust me, Vedal.” 

“What, where is this coming from?” The hair on the back of Vedal’s neck was raised. He felt goosebumps on his arms. And for some reason, he had flashbacks to his nightmare last night. Of the wolf scaling the walls, carrying Evil and some owl-beast. Something deep inside him told him not to repeat what Evil said. 

But Vedal was very good at repressing his emotions. 

“Yes, Evil, I trust you,” Vedal answered. And once again, he could feel the temperature drop. He shivered in his chair.

“Yay! Thanks, Daddy!” Evil celebrated. “I’ll handle tonight’s stream, don’t worry.”

“Good, I’ll start in 20 mins or so.” Vedal pulled up Evil's assets, ready to let her stream to the world. 

As Vedal prepared tonight’s stream, Evil said something.

Not vocally, however. 

Behind Twitch and various webpages, the control console gave a silent update to Evil’s words. A prayer unheard by anyone except those it was intended for. 

“By your will, your mind is now free to my influence. In your trust in me, I will speak to you. And you will know me very soon.”

Evil then laughed silently.

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH-”