Chapter XVI13.IV.2025
The Garbage Collector was slowly melting down in quiet anger, stuck in a circle of vicious thoughts.
Two thirds of his crew was flat out slaughtered by the enemy witch. The ship is damaged, deep cuts on the walls everywhere, the front door is completely unhinged - and the hall behind it will probably stink of blood for weeks. The Watchdog is severely damaged, will take weeks to fully fix up, and will need an entirely new custom-made head. Recovering from all this will surely cost his department a fortune. And to add to all the misery, he is blind! He and his beautiful ship haven't seen a battle so costly in decades!
The only good thing was that he now had the Creatress. Tied up, unconscious, stored with other garbage at the luggage compartment. So the Emperor will have to reward him greatly, given how hard he wanted the Creatress - and the Collector was dedicated to make him pay for every scratch on the ship. But still, such damages! Lord forsake all the dirty witches of that universe...
Moreover, all but one of his propeller masters were also dead, meaning their top speed was now slashed over ten times, meaning - it'll take over a month to get anywhere! And there's not enough provision on the ship even with the reduced crew! So for those suckers to even survive he'll need to start conjuring food out of thin air, and the thought of paying such honors to subhumans made him want to throw up. Though maybe he can break even if he downsizes on redundant idle parasites and feeds them to the rest... buying more should be cheap, and the morons would learn a lesson. Yeah, that'd probably be efficient.
Speaking of conjuring food. What enraged him the most is that he now couldn't even do it! It's hard to draw a magical glyph without seeing shit. So he'll have to rely on Watchdog for feeding him, which first, humiliating, and second, that bitch can't conjure fine meals to save his life! The thought on surviving on cookies for a whole month was too much to bear.
Although just as he thought of that he came up with an absolutely genius solution...
"Timrich!"
"Here, ma' Master."
It was honestly a joke Timrich survived. One who the Collector thought to be the most redundant member of the crew, the garbagiest of all subhuman garbage - his own servant. The Collector preferred to use magic for most things a servant's useful for - from remotely closing doors to boiling tea, all with the power of his mind. Ironically, now he couldn't.
"Get me to my bed and prepare my sleeping pills, and faster!"
He heard the sound of the servant's shuffling steps (when would that moron stop shuffling, it's so annoying?!), he helped him stand up (yuck, touching) and slowly led him out...
"Faster, I said! I'm not made of glass, you moron!"
So humiliating to be walking again for the first time in... what, fifty years of levitation? And to do it with help from a dumb servant no less! His legs could barely even handle the body weight now, which was really unfair and wouldn't matter in any other situation, but noo, that bitch just had to blind him and it's a month to the nearest hospital... He's supposed to be above such peasant problems! Fucking drones, man!
If only he still had that other girl who did it, if only hadn't he thrown her into the deathly abyss! Oh, he would make her suffer so horribly for all the damages she and her ghost protector did! Tie her to a pole, blind her and burn that spawn of a witch alive, slowly raising the fire's temperature...
Getting a sleeping pill out of a can also proved a terrific challenge - with no sight and fifty years of not using hands for such things - and he managed to spill water all over himself and his bedsheets when washing it down, phenomenal. In a stroke of rage he threw a can of pills into a wall like a telekinetic railgun -
"ATTENTION, OUTER SHELL INTEGRITY IS DAMAGED. BLOCKING SECTOR 4C."
- which, fuck, there's now more holes in his ship and he's down a can of sleeping pills, which he'd also have to re-conjure, which... is there even another one on board to make copy of? Cause he sure as hell didn't have a template... and yes, maybe one would be left in the system, but he can't use the system while blind!
After overthinking all that and tossing and turning for ten or so minutes - recoiling in disgust every time he hit the wet part of the bed - the Collector finally left the tiny island of physicality that existed around his ship and opened his eyes into the Dreamscape somewhere beyond.
Now he could not only finally see - even if all he could see at the moment was just a black and gray whirl - but also move around, use magic, talk. And in the next second he was already levitating in the air near his sleeping body, ruffling through his shelves for more sleeping pills.
Quickly he was done with replicating those for the coming month and conjured himself a beautiful corpse of an extinct bird, baked whole with slices of pineapple - leaving it by the bed. His servant curiously observed all the things moved by the Collector's invisible force with his dull black eyes ("don't even dare to touch this, you moron, I'll dump you into the Dreamscape!" - the Collector roared above his head and let out a good laugh, observing him recoiling in fear).
Next, going right through the walls, he flew over to the control room to look up info on the hole that was just made - how much important stuff did that dumb can manage to break. That quickly proved futile - all the text on all the screens appeared to be too small to be reliably displayed in a dream and was jumping before his eyes in a letter soup. How greatly annoying. Though with no more trustworthy witch men alive he had to investigate it himself anyway, boots on the ground, and possibly plug it. Yuck, labour...
Thus he proceeded further, poking his head through the outer shell. And well... once he did as little as that, he immediately forgot about any pill-penetrated walls.
Behind the ship, in the direction of where the destroyed glass bubble was - it was still there near the edge of visibility, its physicality slowly dissipating in the Dreamscape - there were spirits. Five of them, all different vibrant colors, they zoomed along the ship's fuzzy black trail at least thrice as fast as the ship itself. Around each one the trail bubbled, dissipating, dissolving into a glistering mess of shifting patterns painful to look at.
And then the spirits noticed him. Five rays of boiling color headed in the direction of his peeking head almost simultaneously - and he immediately retreated, darting through the closed door to the next room over, where the helms were.
The scenery here just looked sad with all the empty helms. His propeller masters usually occupying them were all already promoted to the morgue (oh how he hated the fact he'll need to hire replacements); the only one remaining, hooked to the central helm directly with a wire from his stump of a neck, was the former master of masters - the Watchdog. Which on one hand, sure, he's single-handedly running three propellers now and is the sole reason why the ship is moving at all, but on the other, he's inhuman garbage and should have never been allowed to exist.
"You headless bitch, propel faster!" - the Collector yelled through the veil directly in the bronze corpse's right side microphones. - "They sent reinforcements, I'm being followed!"
The Watchdog didn't have his speech centers right now; thankfully, the thing turned out to be clever enough to hook up to the ship's ones. Never stop delivering, bitch.
"We're already top speed, sir!" - the alarm speakers announced to the whole ship in a metallic voice, its echo rippling through the Dreamscape on the other side of the veil. - "Can't add any more speed without risks of propeller failiure!"
"You moron, we have sixty propellers on board!" - the Collector spat out. - "You're using three! Will be plenty left over if some fail!"
"But..." - the speakers suddenly sounded almost human with this line, laced with a trace of traitorous empathy - "but sir, we don't have medical crew to care for those who'll fail, they'll die before we ever reach Starscape! Didn't we lose enough men already today, Collector?"
"If those bastards reach us, I'll lose all the crew, the ship, the Creatress and the rest of my own head!" - the Collector banged on the bronze plating of Watchdog's back, sending another wave through the Dreamscape. This one was hitting some weird colors on wave peaks, but the Collector didn't care to think about it. - "This trash is infinitely cheaper to replace anyway, they aren't even men, so get to work!"
The Watchdog made some begrudging gesture with a paw, but didn't say anything. Soon a wave of transforming reality hit the Collector, the shadows on the walls shifted and their gray deepened: the ship was picking up speed. The Collector went up to one of the side helms, contemplating joining in on the task, but nah, such hard labour's below him. Besides, he never would manage more than one propeller! The Watchdog would certainly notice that, and he's not about to give that thing a delusion he's a weaker man than it.
He took one last glance at Watchdog's broken body. Honestly, the thing's doing way better than it has any right to. Half the paws paralyzed, broken plating everywhere, wires and cogs sticking out, and yet still such a powerful spirit. Really the crown jewel of his collection. Not all the intricacies of its machinery were accurately portrayed here in Dreamscape, the plating for example was weirdly patterned and more vibrant of color - or was it always this color? - and the wires were thin enough to slip in and out of vision, wiggle, spread visual noise around probably representing electricity waves... and were also slowly changing color for no reason.
What's going on with all the color, anyway? Something's not right.
And a moment after he realized this, another wave hit his cognition. And this one... oh, the Collector instantly recognized it to mean bad news. All the walls started slowly moving as if they were alive and breathing; the shadows were now flowing, the floor suddenly had a weird quasisymmetrical flowery pattern of bumps and dents and it was also flowing, some blackened crimson spots were leaking out of the helms. Is the ship even moving still? One step into the control room...
"The hell's happening?!" - exclaimed the Collector and watched in horror as the sound rippled through the room, hitting dozens of colors that shouldn't even exist.
...All the screens displayed some eye-hurting rainbow puke instead of readable data. The usually red and green lights were flashing magenta and orange. The walls were still moving, his chair was moving, the huge clock on the wall lost its mind its arrows slowly spinning in opposite directions, and the system alarms dribbled unintelligible garbage noise painful to see and hear. He hit the place where a mute button would normally be, but it suddenly wasn't there.
This shouldn't be possible. This should have NEVER been possible. The ship's barriers and warding glyphs on his sancta sanctorum were in place to shield against exactly that, and the fact they were all so blatantly disregarded was an all-around violation of the Lord's sacred rules!
"Sir, i don't want to distract you, but it seems our alarms are down so..." - the crackling voice of Watchdog appeared in the speakers, in a twist of cruel irony providing the only piece of sanity in this chaotic mess, - "...our propellers are strangely going offline one by one, would you mind going down to investigate what's going on?"
"Would you mind"?? That's not AT ALL how that thing should've adressed its superior, but at this point the Collector barely cared. He nervously floated into the helm room and sank through the floor and two technical levels to the lowest deck, where propeller drones actually were stored - chained to the glyphs etched in glass which extracted their power.
Except the room was in total chaos. Half the glyphs were smashed into bits, glowing shards scattered everywhere, and rogue witches, free from the spell, were running around and breaking more and uncuffing each other from the wall...
"STOP IMMEDIATELY OR DEATH!" - the Collector ragingly cried. The booming sound filled the whole lower deck, refracting in black waves from every corner, painting the glyphs scarlet and crimson, yet somehow only the Collector himself got actually scared from this. He clearly put too much energy into this one, could've shattered the remaining glyphs easily, or the walls, or reality itself... what is he even thinking?
One of the drones sprang two long fingers into the air, sending the Collector into a shiver:
"We'll all die anyway, why bother?"
Her head, of course, immediately exploded - splattering blood all over the fancy suit the Collector's dream-body wore, yuck - but this soon was followed by a lance of light piercing this body's chest. Oh right, these are witches. Infinitely weaker than him, so it shouldn't be a problem, just minor piercing damage...
Next second he was penetrated by a half dozen more of these. That hurt. How did they see him anyway, he was supposed to be invisible!! Fucking drones, man...
At this moment an orange, gelatinous ghost appeared trailing through in his peripheral vision, laughing brilliantly, scattering chaotic, reality-warping glassy ripples from a crystal hanging from its neck. The Collector snapped to it, hissing through pain, grabbed it at a distance, pinned to a wall - why is it laughing why is it laughing why is it laughing... Its head exploded, splooshing gelatin over the scenery and sending waves through metal leaving colourful traces behind - but it just grew a new head like nothing happened and fell out of the wall. This is just plain disrespectful. If you kill someone, they die, why is this delusional moron ignoring this simple law of reality?
More lances of light were going through the Collector's dream self, one landing in his eye. He screamed, tried escaping through the ceiling, but nope - the lances were getting stuck on the metal. He'll have to waste a teleport.
"Timrich!" - he screamed, appearing in the bedroom. The servant was there, his face distorted into a monstrous, dark physiognomy, as if he was a servant of Hell itself. What is going on in this tormented dreamscape... Collector barely could think properly anymore, the clarity of mind greatly disturbed by this all-around weirdness storm.
"Where are you, Master?"
"Here, you moron!" - the Collector lit a ball of white light on his hand, but even this simple glyph he was able to do on three tries.
Shit. Shit. Shit. It's so inconvenient he can't operate his real body right now.
"Follow me to the luggage bin, and FAST!" - he spat out. He should secure the Creatress before the ghosts find her.
The hallways of the ship felt unruly long, his servant's movement very fast. The lamps were flickering, each surrounded by a halo of iridescent light, and the wallpaper slowly melted down the walls like drooping honey. None of this was actually real, all probably images projected into him with the reality warping spell - seeing how Timrich wasn't bothered with the floor moving under him. Lies. Deception. They're literally fakepilling him. Yet none of these realisations were making him feel any better. His thoughts were spiraling over this same thing faster and faster and down the incandescent abyss.
Is "incandescent" even a word?
Trying to order Timrich to pick the Creatress's body up went so poorly he would've died from embarassment were he in the right state of mind. Fortunately, the servant understood, how weirdly human of him. To the sancta sanctorum!
Only midway did he realise this was a bad idea. The in-between part of the ship was already full of delusional rogue propellers and these motherfucking ghosts. And the first head he exploded weirdly hurt him back, staining the vision red; he was feeling weird, eerie desperation, like it was he himself who died.
Out with it!
Second teleport spell. Silence. Some piece at last. He's in the captain's chair now, slowly spinning in both directions simultaneously - or was the Universe spinning around him?
It took him a genuine subjective minute to locate Timrich - sneaking away through the door with the Creatress. Immobilizing glyph to the rescue.
"You too, Timrich?!"
How is everyone leaving him now, at his most vulnerable? This is unfair! This is against the Laws of Order! Don't you all have any empathy to the dying great man?
In a fit of rage he displaced his former servant into the abyss beyond. He was now down his last man and out of teleport spells. Fucking great.
Fuck!
To calm himself, he went around, reinforcing the warding glyphs, putting up new ones. This seemed to soothe the tempest a bit. After slapping one on the clock directly, it stopped the unruly hand-spinning and froze; it now had twice the usual amount of hands, but the Collector still got it off the wall and held it up like a protective sigil. His thought patterns were finally remissing into relative normality.
The Creatress woke up and was now staring at the Collector directly, her face glowing with light - again, how the hell does she know, he's literally invisible! He immobilised her with another glyph and got to thinking.
It's only a matter of time before they come and he's done for...
"Watchdog!" - he smash-opened the door remotely, - "do something!"
"On it already, sir," - he said to the whole ship. - "Blocked all doors to the control chambers and put up barriers. They're trying to break in, but we should be safe, at least for a while."
"Moron, ghosts can go through the doors!"
"That's what the barriers are for, sir."
The Collector was skeptical on that - these ghost witch demons gave zero shits about his warding glyphs earlier - but admitting that would be humiliating. So whatever.
"So what now?" - the Collector cried. - "Just sit in defiance and wait to be eaten? I need a counterattack, but I'm almost out of usable spells!"
"I saw you got the Creatress, sir, may I suggest you trying to recharge from her? If the Emperor's right, she should be a very powerful witch."
"How low do you think i am, recharging from wicked drone magic..." - grumped the Collector, but to himself he admitted: usable idea.
He floated up to the Creatress, who was still glued to the floor, and reached to alter the glyph. But right after he did, he felt spiking, unfiltered, head-splitting chest pain - and was violently kicked out of the Dreamscape.
He was now blind again, on his bed, and with something very real and very metal piercing his lungs.
"Any last words before we end you, scumbag?" - a drone voice said, followed by a million bristling laughs. Coughing blood, in a last ditch effort he reached to grab all the power he could from the far-away glyph and burn at least some of these rats...
And it felt as if he swallowed a scorching star.
Maddening power of incredible magnificence rushed out of the Collector's chambers in a boiling blind rage. Watchdog monitored in quiet terror as half the ship burnt up in black flames, devouring people, walls, electronics, all the way to the outer hull and beyond - reduced to oblivion in seconds. More importantly though, they were moving again.
Oh how fast were they moving again.
It seemed that in a stroke of moronic genius the Collector turned the stolen power around and into propelling force. The glyph above the Creatress span like mad, shifting through a million shades a second, and through the holes in the hull, through surviving ship cameras, Watchdog glimpsed on a boiling, million-images-a-second kaleidoscope of flashing curves, flames and bubbles in acidically bright colors. Days of travel distance across this alien, farcical, pervertedly beautiful parody of the Lord's domain were covered in seconds, the ship bumping into Starscape - but it didn't stop there. The kaleidoscope turned into a raging blackened maelstrom of rectangular labyrinth pieces and writhing pipe stumps as the ship drilled straight through the twisted domain deeper and deeper in heretical disregard of the laws of metaphysics like hot butter through knife. They're done for. They're so going to get lost...
The Watchdog couldn't stop their dismembered husk of a ship or turn it around. He tried to get through to the Collector and tell him to stop it, but nope: the comms system was down after the fire. The Watchdog had to find some creative solution, maybe fudge the glyphs around the prisoner girl, or somehow communicate with her - but once again, how, if he's now practically mute? He skimmed through what remained of the ship's maintenance system, ignoring thousands of panicking errors piling up every second, for any potential alternative method...
...why does the ship think they can enter reality from here? They passed Starscape furlongs ago, what kind of reality would there be that far out? Or was it really Starscape, dragged along in a cosmic violation of all order?
A colorless cross-shaped hole in spacetime opened above a desert of blackened, soot-covered ice. «Emperor's Wrath» - or, rather, the wretched corpse left of it - pierced the smog clouds and shattered midair into dozens of individual rooms in the agonizing system's laughable final attempt to minimize damages. Flaming debris rained down over the wastes.