Broken Masquerade

(Joseph)

"Who the hell are you?"

Well, I thought, as I stared at Uzi staring at me, the exit door to my no-so-secret-anymore lair shutting being me, there goes my plans to go into sleep-mode early tonight.

I overclocked. I was honestly expecting Uzi to figure things out sooner or later, she was too genre-savvy and into anime to miss the absolutely ridiculous amount of hints I'd deliberately dropped (partly just to troll her, but still), but I wasn't sure what exactly she was thinking right now. She could be thinking I'm a time traveler or something, for all I knew. Still, she'd apparently snuck after me and waited for me to come out my lair-- note to self, set up hidden exterior cameras --so there wasn't any way I was bullshitting my way out of this. Nor did I want to try that. I respected Uzi as a person too much for that. So, contrary to every fucking Isekai Protagonist ever who totally fumbles the ball on this shit, I'm just going to be calm about this, and try to reasonably answer every single question I feel safe answering… Why the fuck did I get the sudden feeling that a massive betting pool on the other side of the 4th Wall just closed?

Anyways, while I was still in bullet time, I should establish some quick rules for myself on what I should not say to Uzi.

1. Do not mention Murder Drones Rule 34. Unless she asks me directly, then give her a shit-eating grin and tell her that I'll tell her the answer to that when she's older. Also, really hope she doesn't ask me, because that's gonna be really fucking uncomfortable for us both.

2. Mention nothing about shipping. Period. I will not try and force anything, because trying to do so is liable to end in massive heart… core?-break. I will also not risk sabotaging NUzi or NUziV before it can even have a chance.

3. Do not explicitly mention how to kill the Solver. "Burn it in sunlight" is okay, but I have no clue if Robot Cthulhu Satan can read memories while possessing someone, and it learning how it dies means it can prevent that from happening. WHICH IS BAD.

Anything else can be on a case-by-case basis. Alright then. Just need to… handle this. Gods, I wished Uzi could have taken another month or two to figure things out. I'd have been done with Vault 2 by then. Ah well, I deliberately dug this grave, may as well lie in it. I snapped back to regular time, meeting a terrified purple gaze with my light-gray one. "I'm still Joseph, Uzi. I never lied about that. I just… lied about where I came from."

Hollow purple optics gazed at me, and that hurt . "You… what is all this? Who are you?!? "

I raised my hands. "Uzi? I promise I'll try to answer as many questions as I safely can, but I need you to stay calm, okay?"

" Calm?!? You're breaking the sound-barrier in there--" Ah, right. That would make it past my soundproofing measures. Gonna have to do something about that later "--you have some kind of secret lair , you know the future --"

"Uzi?" I said, trying to stay calm, and taking a step forward. She flinched back, and that really hurt. I stopped. "I'm not gonna hurt you. I'm not gonna do anything bad to you. I just want you to calm down, and I'll try and answer you, okay?"

Her hands were shaking. "You promise?"

"I promise," I told her. "Now, I just want to ask you before anything else, to make sure I'm not operating under any false assumptions, you followed me here tonight, right?"

"Y-yeah."

"Okay," I said, taking a breath and forcing down my own nerves. I'd prefer to get through this without tripping my emotional repression programs. "You said you think I know the future, but what exact conclusion did you come to? I'm not gonna judge, I just wanna be sure, okay?" Uzi suddenly flushed, looking down and to the side as she mumbled something. "I promise I'm not gonna laugh or make fun of you, Uzi."

"I… I think you're an Isekai Protagonist," she murmured.

"Time travel or 4th Wall?" I pushed for clarification.

"4th Wall. That's… why you kept having us watch those Isekai Animes, didn't you? You were trying to give us hints."

"Partly," I said. "Are you a bit more calm?" I kept up an even, friendly tone.

"I'm confused," she admitted. "And… really scared, because you said you were gonna kill a god, and now I think you were actually serious about that."

"Can I give you a hug?" I questioned. "You can say no! You just look like you need one."

"I… think I'm good for now, Joseph."

"Okay then. That's fair." I took a step back, showing I was respecting her boundaries and personal space. "Can you walk back into the hallway real quick? I don't wanna have this conversation in the dark, and it only now occurs to me that there's only the one way to open the secret door from this side," I said, chuckling a bit at the end.

"You're, not gonna… try and hide or something?"

"Nope," I popped the p, "I just figured you'd wanna step out before me, so you can keep an eye on me, and then I'll show you how to get in as a gesture of goodwill, okay?"

Her optics were starting to fill back in. "You… you promise?"

"I promise, Uzi."

She nodded, and slowly backed into the hallway outside the warehouse. I waited for her to take the first few steps and then followed while maintaining distance. 43.79 seconds later, we were both out there. "Alright," I said, still keeping up an even tone for the clearly scared girl. "Lemme show you my cool secret door!" I pulled the fuse box open. "So! If you pay attention," I said, stepping to the side so she could lean forwards a bit, "You'll notice the fuse box for the lights don't match the number of warehouses. Flick the odd switch out, and seemingly nothing happens," I continued, doing so and strolling to the opposite corner. "However! Doing so allows a hidden button in this corner to be activated-- uh, before I press it, it's sets off a timer for the next step, so I'm letting you know in advance to jog after me, okay?" Uzi nodded, confused, but following. I pushed the button with my foot, and took a slow jog towards the secret door, making sure to keep a respectable distance to Uzi but not look like I was trying to get a head start to run. She followed a bit behind me and her optics widened on seeing the secret keypad that had flipped open. "The keypad goes back into hiding after 30 seconds, and the password is '420DoorsSuckShit,'" I had to stop talking while entering the password as Uzi snickered for a moment before clapping her hands over her mouth. "Yeah, your dad would never guess that." The secret door swung back open "Aaaaaand, we're in," I said, swinging a hand wide. "I set everything to close up automatically behind us." I strolled in, turning around just inside the doorframe. "Right this way." I kept my hands open and at my sides as Uzi hesitantly walked up to me and then past me as she stepped inside. I followed her in, and then clapped twice, all the lights turning on. I was gonna have to get rid of that feature when I made Vault 1 public, because a lot of people would get annoyed if the lights went on and off all the time, but for now, it was really fucking cool.

The lights came on, and for the first time a native to this dimension got a clear look at my secret lair. " Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat-the-fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck? " Uzi blurted out, jaw hanging as she glanced around, taking in the workshop, the firing range in the distance, the door on the far wall labelled Armory , the-- "ARE THOSE TWO INDUSTRIAL GRADE MATTER PRINTERS?!?" she screamed as she whipped back around to stare at me with wide optics.

"Yep," I said, smiling as I clasped my hands behind my back.

"How did you get them?!?"

"I built them and this time I will actually explain it ," I cut her off before she could blow up on me, "requisitions lets you make the parts for a personal printer. I got them, wheeled them over here with a trolley I fabricated, it's still over in Storage," I added releasing a hand from behind my back to jerk it towards Storage, "fabricated some power cells, and then spent like a month paintstakingly lugging those powercells here to use them to fabricate the parts for a small-ish CF reactor, which I learned how to assemble and maintain from pirating shit off the internet, and then back to my hab to recharge them there until I had it built. I used it to power the personal printer, and then printed parts for a bigger CF reactor, which is in the back, to power an industrial grade one, and then I fabricated that , hooked it up, and then built a second one using the first." Uzi stared at me blankly. "Fried your brain a bit?"

"Are you actually a human?" she blurted out.

I started laughing. "I was . Honestly, though? If brain uploading with a proven transfer of consciousness was a thing in my first life, I'd have taken it. Sure, the dysmorphia was literally nightmare inducing… until I turned off my dreams, and was otherwise just horrific in general for a week or so, but I got used to it, and I gotta say: not having to piss, or have acid reflux, or collapsed arches, or be nearsighted-- especially that --really fucking nice, you know?"

"Dysmorphia?" she asked me.

"I woke up that first day," I said, closing my optics as I tried not to relieve those picture-perfect memories, "tried to blink, and my eyes didn't move," I added, optics ringing out. "I took a breath, and I didn't have lungs , and thought I was suffocating. I spoke to Dr Hayden, and it wasn't with my voice ."

Uzi stared at me, frozen for a few moments, probably overclocked herself. " Oh ," she said in a low voice. "I'm… sorry to hear that."

"Thanks," I said, looking down and sighing as I tried to stop recalling those sensations.

Thankfully, Uzi distracted me from my thoughts. "That's why you changed your voice from Andrew's?"

"Partly that, and partly that I didn't want to disrespect the corpse I was unwillingly and unwittingly shoved into by using his voice. He was dead before I showed up, and even if I couldn't do anything about it, I wasn't going to pretend to be someone I wasn't."

"How much of… everything was you pretending?"

"I… I never lied about my name. It's always been Joseph--"

"What about your last name?"

I looked at Uzi, incredulous. "I got Isekai'd !" I protested. "That means the multiverse is real ! You think I'm gonna dox another version of myself like that?!?"

Uzi blinked a few times, and then gave a sheepish grin. "No, that's fair."

I started laughing. She laughed just a little bit too, but sobered up fast. Her eyemotes were solid again, but she was still clearly nervous, fidgeting as she kept throwing glances around Vault 1. "Look," I said. "One of my side rooms here has a break room, and I got some antifreeze there. Wanna have a seat and talk this out?"

"S-sure," She said, and I gestured for her to follow. It only took us 93.35 (internal clocks were cool, okay?) seconds to walk over to it, open the door, step inside, and I opened the fridge and got out two bottles of antifreeze, mine tasting like blue raspberry, and hers tasting like cherry, which was her favorite.

"Did you know this was my favorite?" she suddenly asked. "Like, before you met me?"

"No," I said. "I know a lot, but probably less than you think," I clarified, taking a swig.

"But… you're like… actually , what? A self insert?"

"I wish ! I'd actually know what I've got in store for myself specifically." I sighed. "I should probably start from the beginning, though."

Uzi took a drink, still tense. "I'd… I really want an explanation for everything."

"Right, that's fair." I took a moment to stare at my drink. "It's… before I get going, there's some things I wanna say first. This… it's going to be cathartic to get this off my chest, so to speak, but… there are some things I won't tell you. Not because I don't trust you!" I clarified at Uzi's scowl. "There's some stuff that if the wrong people learn it, people will die." Her optics hollowed. "I can tell you, like… 95-99% of everything. I'll try to answer as much as I can, but there's things I just won't . I'll try my best to explain why I won't but that's the best I can do."

"I… people are actually going to die?"

"People we know ." Uzi's mouth hung open. "I… I'm doing my best to make sure that no one dies, but there's… so much coming, so many things to manage, so many things to do… I know you're impulsive, Uzi, but if you fly off the handle here, our friends can die . So… you don't need to be scared, but I need you to work with me, here, okay? I'll tell you what I can. I'll try to keep you in the loop. But I really need to stress this: Don't go off and do something big without running it by me first."

She looked at me, fingers fidgeting, and gave a shaky nod.

"Alright," I said. "Next, I don't know how I got here. Or when . I know this is a separate universe or timeline because there's some stuff from my first life that just didn't happen in my timeline-- a very small amount of differences in the early 2000s, but there nonetheless. I don't know if someone sent me here, or it was some random fluke. The last concrete date I can recall of my first life is May 10th, 2025, but I have some memories from before then and a lot more after that scrambled from anywhere between 'fuzzy' to 'incomprehensible.' And some of them are just gone . Which is doubly weird because all my other memories are literally picture perfect. I didn't choose to show up here, specifically, to show up when I did, specifically, or to wake up in Andrew's corpse . God," I said, "if I had any choice, I wouldn't have wanted to wake up in the corpse of a child . It… it hurts every time I interact with Kelsey, you know? I'm piloting the corpse of her friend. I didn't want to. I never asked for this. It just… it just happened , and now I have to live with it." I put my hands in my face.

"You… you really don't know any of that? You really didn't have any choice over any of that?"

"No clue," I mumbled. "I'd have never done that if I had the choice." I heard a chair scrape, and some footsteps, and then Uzi suddenly gave me a hug. I stiffened. I gave a self-deprecating chuckle. "Uh, for the record, I was 25 before I ended up here. Technically 27 in my chrome-dome now. And uh, very much do not want to be a pedo, so if it's any consolation, I am trying very hard not to have an Isekai harem, because that's both fucked up from a moral standpoint and cringe in general."

Uzi let go of me, taking a step back. She gave a slightly hysterical laugh. "You would have that as one of your top concerns, wouldn't you?"

"Guilty as charged," I said, listening while Uzi sat back down and then looking up at her again.

"So… you never faked who you were in, like, terms of your personality?" she asked me.

"Always have been an unhinged jackass, always will be," I said with a sardonic grin. "Just… lied about where I really came from. Even as genre-savvy as you are, would you have believed me if I went up to you and said I was an Isekai Protagonist the first time we met?"

"Considering I ambushed you with a wrench, probably not."

It was my turn to chuckle and down some antifreeze. "It took me like seven months to get used to this stuff being food, you know?" I said. "My instincts told me I was eating poison every freaking meal that whole time. Gods, it sucked !"

Uzi winced. "Yeah, that probably would."

"Alright," I said, "enough beating around the bush." I took an unnecessary breath. "So, before I showed up here, there was an Indie Animated Series I watched on youtube. Murder Drones , animated by a channel named Glitch Productions, created by a guy named Liam Vickers."

Uzi suddenly stiffened and gave me a look . "Are… are we just characters to you?"

I shot back in my chair enough that I almost fell. "NO!" I shouted. "No… never! You're all real to me. You're people I care about! As friends . I don't care that you were characters back in my first life. You're here. I'm here. We're all real. I'd never treat any of you like you aren't people ." I took a moment to try and collect myself. "The show… there was only eight episodes. None of them were longer than 26 minutes of run-time. Hell, half of them were shorter than 21 minutes! You… there is so much more to all of you than what was on that screen. You're real people. It's impossible that you aren't. I… I am so genuinely happy I got to know you all."

"That… sounds like a short show." Uzi said, eyemote raised.

"You're telling me? I was almost willing to kill for some extra worldbuilding," I snarked. "Half of you weren't even on the screen for more than 40 minutes."

Uzi flinched. "Was… was I important?"

I grinned, scooched my chair back in, took another swig of antifreeze, and leaned in. "You were the main character."

Uzi did a mental reboot in front of me. Literally. "Y… y-y… y-you're pulling my leg! No way!"

I played an audio file from one of my memories through my own vocalizer. " I'm an edgy teen, Thad. Bite me!" Uzi blinked as her voice came out of me. "Yes way," I said in my own voice.

"Oh my god, you're serious," she said. " I'm the main character? I'm the main character ?"

"A murder drone scanning you in the Pilot literally detects Plot Armor on you. I'm like… 90% sure that it was just a visual gag, though. So please don't actually think you're invincible, because you nearly die, like, a lot ."

She sobered up fast. "Nearly die?"

"You don't actually die, mind you, but I think we'd both like to avoid near-death experiences, right?"

"Yeah," she agreed, downing some more antifreeze. I rolled my optics, and went to the fridge and got another bottle for both of us. We were gonna need them at this rate. "What about everyone else?"

I sucked in a breath, and she paused from going to take another sip, and looked at me with mourning concern. "You're not gonna like it," I said. I raised a hand to forestall any protests, "I'll tell you if you want to hear, but you're not going to like it."

Optics hollow, she asked in a fearful tone, "W…w-who dies?" I winced. Gods, Uzi was too genre-savvy, sometimes.

I grit my teeth, but didn't hide the truth. "Riley. Penny. Sam. Braidon. Emily," Uzi started shaking. "Kelsey," she sucked in a breath, "Darren and Rebecca," she whimpered, whispering " No ."

" Doll ," I said in a low voice.

"NO!" Uzi shouted, looking up at me, her right optic flickering for half a second and making my synthetic veins run cold. Gods, this tripping her Solver early would be the fucking mother of all ironies, wouldn't it? And over concern for Doll to top that off?

"I'm not letting it happen!" I shouted. "I won't . I'll die first to keep them safe!" And I actually fucking meant it. "I already headed off the circumstances they're all supposed to die to in the canon timeline anyways!" I added.

Uzi was shaking. "You promise? Do you promise you're gonna keep them safe?"

"I'm going to get you all through this alive, damn it. Maybe not in one piece , not for lack of trying, mind you, but we're robots, so we can fix that!"

Uzi's mouth was moving, but she wasn't talking, and she was still shivering. I shot up, and stalked around the table, wrapping her up in a hug. She hugged me back, still shaking, starting to sniffle. "You… how…" she mumbled.

Darkxwolf16: How'd you change things? How did you save them already?

"I… I've changed a lot already," I said. "Do you know what would have happened in canon? If Andrew stayed dead? And I was never here?"

Darkxwolf16: I wouldn't have jumped you in that hallway… we wouldn't have met…

Darkxwolf16: Oh my robo-god.

Darkxwolf16: Lizzy would have kept getting WORSE. Rebecca too.

Darkxwolf16: Doll would have stayed with her. We… we'd have never been family again.

Darkxwolf16: Thad… probably still would have been nice to me, because he's Thad.

Darkxwolf16: But no one else would have been my friend.

Darkxwolf16: I'd… I'd have been alone.

Darkxwolf16: And you'd have never punched dad in the face…

Darkxwolf16: He'd have gotten worse too, wouldn't he?

Darkxwolf16: And the bullying?

She hugged me tighter.

Darkxwolf16: Holy shit.

Darkxwolf16: Oh my robo-god.

Darkxwolf16: It would have all been SO much worse for me.

"Already got us in a better timeline, see?" I said, my own voice strained. "But yeah, you… you'd have had a really rough time if I wasn't here. All of you would have, even discounting the deaths. But… I set you all up with a basic social support structure this time around. Doll… Doll has friends who actually care about her this time around. She has a steady supply of ethically sourced oil. She's never going to have to choose between murder and cannibalism or overheating and dying--"

"MURDER AND CANNIBALISM?!?" Uzi squeaked out in a cracking voice.

"She needs oil," I said. "But I made sure she's gonna be getting enough without having to hurt anyone… that's… that's how Kelsey was supposed to die." Uzi stiffened up, going nonverbal again.

Darkxwolf16: Doll kills Kelsey?

"Among others," I said. "But she's never going to be put in that position because of me! Because of us !" I argued. "One of us wouldn't have been enough for her oil, but we have a surplus between everyone! She'll be fine, she won't revenge spiral against the Murder Drones and go off the deep end and murder a bunch of people and then get her chest torn open by an Eldritch Horror and have her core slurped out of it right in front of you."

Uzi started hyperventilating, and I mentally facepalmed because my hands were occupied hugging her. Did I really just fucking say that out loud? Gods, I am a fucking idiot , and this is why I overclock all the fucking time, because I have zero godsdamned filter between my processors and vocalizers… huh… I really was using drone idioms instead of organic ones now. Freaky. But I'm digressing! Comfort adorable Emo Grape, Joe!

"Uzi! It's not gonna happen! I stopped it! Years ahead of time! We're gonna keep her safe! I need you to stay with me, okay! We'll keep her safe! You can help me keep her safe, okay?" I kept telling her stuff like that while she slowly started to get her venting under control, still shaking all the while.

Darkxwolf16: We're gonna save her, right? RIGHT?!?

"We're gonna save her together , Uzi. I told you, I, we already headed off the circumstances that lead to her killing people and dying like in canon. And honestly, canon sucks . I'm happy to derail most of it."

Darkxwolf16: You're not gonna try and force things along a certain path?

"I could , but with a few exceptions because changing those things might kill everyone, I'm happy to try and flip the board, so to speak."

Darkxwolf16: You…

Darkxwolf16: You said an Eldritch Horror.

Darkxwolf16: You "suggested" I had the same thing Doll does. That we got it from our moms.

Darkxwolf16: I DO have whatever it is, don't I? That's why I'm the main character, right?

"You are absolutely a genre-savvy weeb, Uzi Doorman," I told her. She suddenly pulled back and shot me a glare. "And that makes you fucking awesome ," I said. The glare went away. "You do have it, though." Her optics shifted to concern. "As far as I'm aware, it only unlocks when you either have a near-death experience or suffer severe trauma. You weren't there for Nori's death. Doll saw her parents torn apart in front of her, and… You need to keep this secret if I tell you," I suddenly got serious.

Darkxwolf16: Keep what secret?

"Promise me. You cannot tell anyone about this."

Uzi finally found her voice again. "I-is this that deep dark secret you said Doll had?"

"Yes."

"I'm not gonna like this, am I?"

"No."

"Is this why she doesn't want anyone in her house?"

"Yeah."

"And Lizzy knows this already?"

"Yep," I said, popping the p.

"And it's not cannibalism or murder, because you said we headed that off… what is it?"

"Promise me first that you're keeping your mouth shut."

"Fine! I promise I won't say anything."

"Doll… still-has-her-parents-corpses-in-her-hab," I blurted out.

Uzi stared at me. One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. "Can you repeat that? I'm not trusting my memory banks right now," she said, sounding slightly hysterical.

"Doll… still… has her parent's corpses in her hab… sitting in her living room…"

"Joe."

"Uzi?"

"Why haven't you done anything about that?!?"

"How the fuck am I supposed to approach that?!?" I protested.

Uzi stared at me again. "I'll give you that." She stopped hugging me, and shifted in her seat, putting her hands on her cheeks and staring at the table. "Holy shit ." She looked at me. "Do you have any gasoline in here?"

"Uzi, you're nine , I'm not giving you robot alcohol."

"That wasn't a no ," she said, going back to staring ahead.

"I'm trying to figure out how to make robot sake. Yes, I was an Italian American in my first life, but unless robo-limoncello is a thing, I'd prefer that."

I went back to my chair. We both just sat there for a minute. "Aunt Yeva and Uncle Mikhail's corpses are literally still sitting on the couch in my cousin's living room." she said. It wasn't a question. She kinda just said it because it was that absurd. She grabbed her antifreeze and downed the bottle, and then grabbed the second and began to chug it as well. I sighed and went to the fridge to grab a third. And a third for myself, because I downed my whole first bottle and a third of the second as soon as I got back.

"I'm gonna change the subject," I blurted out as I sat back down. Uzi gave me a semi-hysterical chuckle in response. "So like I said, that thing Doll has, you have it too, it's just not active yet."

"And what is it ?" she asked me.

"I'm not entirely sure," I admitted. She looked up at me, and I raised my hands, " Si calmi, Uzi, let me explain, I said I'd try to explain as best as I can understand. Murder Drones-- the show, that is --was a sci-fi cosmic horror ."

Uzi's optics hollowed again. "Oh my robo-god, you really are serious about the planned deicide. We fight a fucking god ?!?"

"I mean, you kill it, so…" I trailed off.

" How?!? "

"Literally burn it in the light of day because it's an Eldritch Horror that has that as a weakness because its some kind of monstrosity beyond mortal comprehension. You… accomplish that by throwing a black hole through the planet to let the sunlight shine directly from the other side of the planet."

Uzi hyperfixated on something besides fear. "I can make black holes ?!?"

"Technically, a [NULL] isn't a black hole in the strictest sense, since it has no gravitational pull, but it is still a singularity that annihilates whatever it goes through."

"Are you sure I can't unlock my cool magic powers now?"

"Uzi?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you like controlling your own body?"

"I can get possessed?!? " Fucking damnit, she was too genre-savvy.

"Yes. By the god we're trying to kill. So that's why I'd like you to not set yourself off early, so I don't have to worry about an Eldritch Horror taking control of you and making you eat half your class."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, Uzi was back to being scared.

Darkxwolf16: That's…

Darkxwolf16: That's what happens, in the show. Doesn't it?

I winced. "Yeah," I admitted. "But, you know, we got oil to spare for you, too, you… just don't need it yet, you know?"

Darkxwolf16: We're all fucked in the future , aren't we?

"You live!" I protested. "So does Lizzy and Thad!"

Uzi looked at me and suddenly found her voice again. "Of course Thad lives! He's Thad ."

I chuckled. "Right… so… the thing , the Eldritch Horror is called The Absolute Solver of the Fabric of Reality and the Void, the Exponential End, and on a conceptual scale, it is a personification of Entropy. More colloquially, we can refer to it as the Absolute Solver or just the Solver. I personally refer to it as Robot Cthulhu Satan, because that's basically what it is. In the show, you refer to it as Robo-Satan a couple times."

"Does it have tentacles?" she asked, bracing herself.

"Do masses of cables with human hands at the end, segmented arms with claws on the end, and a giant cybernetic centipede form count?"

Darkxwolf16: No, but that's worse!

Darkxwolf16: I have that IN ME?!?

"The centipede thing, the claws, and the human hands? No," I said, and Uzi slumped in relief. "Some other stuff… not yet ?"

Darkxwolf16: That's not helping!

"You get creepy wings that are halfway between human hands and bat wings, and a tail with a reptilian head with a bunch of eyes and sharp teeth."

Darkxwolf16: I GET ORGANIC STUFF COMING OUT OF ME?!?

Darkxwolf16: NOPE!

Darkxwolf16: I'M GOOD!

Darkxwolf16: CAN DEFINITELY WAIT ON UNLOCKING THE SATAN POWERS!!!

I had to overclock to not laugh, because Uzi didn't need that right now. "You also get admin privileges over reality . Telekinesis, teleportation, the ability to duplicate objects, transmute materials, regeneration, some kind of limited shape shifting, and some other cool stuff."

Darkxwolf16: That sounds better.

"But having it active demands a price. Your cooling systems can't keep up with the heat it makes."

Darkxwolf16: That's why Doll's losing oil?

"Correct. We've been helping her out, all of us, so I don't think she's progressed to the point of actually using any Solver abilities yet, and she might still even be able to experience sunlight without burning--"

"WHAT?!?" Uzi blurted out.

"I told you the Solver burns in sunlight."

"But so do we ?"

"Well, I don't. I don't have it. You and Doll got it from your respective moms."

"Wait…" Uzi said, and she froze stock still. Definitely overclocked herself. Three and a half seconds went by, and then she snapped back to real-time. "So drones with the Solver need oil. The Murder Drones have been observed drinking out oil from us. You said the show you watched is called Murder Drones. Did the Solver make them?"

"Fucking damnit , Uzi, you're genre-savvy," I said. "But yes, it did."

"What about the humans, then?"

"Yeeeeaaaaaaaahhh…" I trailed off, briefly overclocked to work out the phrasing for this because I did not want to traumatize Uzi again , and settled on, "So, rich humans are stupid assholes, and it turns out that when a Worker Drone is improperly disposed of, there is a 0.01% chance that they can self-reboot. Out of those scenarios, there is a 70.3% chance that they turn back on line as their old selves, or their old selves in personality but with some degree of lost memories, a 29.0% chance they experience "terminal lockout," which the show never explains what that is, and a 0.7% chance of--"

"'Potentially hazardous mutations?'" she cut me off and made air quotes as she said it.

"Uzi? Stop being so genre-savvy, because that was the exact fucking term used in the show."

"Sorry," Uzi said, having the decency to look sheepish, but also a little smug, which I guessed she earned.

"So, where was I?" I sarcastically asked. "Right, so some assholes named the Elliots, who had the sweetest daughter you could imagine despite them being abusive ritardati , were so obscenely rich they could ignore petty things like laws that shackled the poor down--"

"Are you a freaking communist?" Uzi said, having finally noticed the pin on my coat.

I sighed. "Uzi?"

"Yeah?"

"One: Stop interrupting me please . Two: I am an anarcho-syndicalist in the ideological sense, please do not lump me in with that bureaucratic butcher Stalin or that warmongerer Trotsky. Vanguardist ideologies are doomed to fail from the start."

Uzi's optics flickered, and I waited while she ran an internet search in overclock. "Oooooooooooooh, that's the difference."

"Thank you. Now where was I, again?" I reran my memories to grab my train of thought. "Right! So the Elliot DNA donors were total shitheads who chained their own kid to her bed and literally murdered their drone slaves on a whim and then disposed of them en-masse in a dump full of corpses. Yeah, hazardous mutations are a 0.7% chance on an already 0.01% chance of reactivation in the first place is really low, but if you roll the dice enough time with a literal landfill of dead drones, you're gonna hit those odds eventually. I'll tell you the full story later, but a drone rebooted and rolled those odds, and was contacted by something from beyond this reality."

"The Absolute Solver?"

"The Absolute Solver," I confirmed. "The show… didn't make it clear if the drone, Cyn, was possessed as soon as it Let It In, or if it was just lurking in her systems for a while, and then suddenly took over, or if Cyn just had the Solver and then used it to commit all the atrocities that happened herself. But the lyrics of Bite Me do imply that Cyn and the Solver are separate entities, and that the Solver was just pretending to be Cyn to induce even more psychological torture on everyone who knew Cyn." Uzi actually waited for me to finish my thought this time before she interjected.

"That song you gave me, that's also on my mom's backup Ipod, it was in the show?"

"It was literally the BGM for the final battle where you throw hands with Robot Cthulhu Satan side by side with two Disassembly Drones."

"I get an epic anime battle against a god with my mom's nightcore as background music?" she whispered to herself. Then she blinked. "Dissasembly Drones?"

"The, ah, politically correct term for Murder Drones?"

"We work with those monsters ?"

"Right," I said, "let's put a pin on that and let me back up for a second. So, Tessa, that daughter to the two assholes I told ya about. Amazing girl, turned out the exact opposite of her parents. They'd beat her and chain her to her bed because she kept sneaking into the corpse heaps to try and salvage and revive drones. Girl loved drones, hated what her parents did to them, saw them as people, great mechanic. If you met her, you'd probably have been friends with her. One day, she digs up Cyn from the corpse heap. An indeterminate amount of time later, but that can't have been more than a few years because Tessa isn't really visibly older between that scene and episode 5, Cyn flips the fuck out, goes full Eldritch Horror, and murders everyone at a gala, including Tessa, and then wears her flayed skin as a costume for shits and giggles. She hacks all the drones in the manor, turns them into Disassembly Drones with a shackled version of the Solver that still have the regeneration and the need for oil plus weakness to sunlight, and all the weapons and flight and nanite acid you know and hate, but none of the magic powers. They go on a bit of a genocide spree, kill a couple billion people, and then the Solver gets bored and eats Earth with a [NULL]. Then it takes its Disassemblers, clones them a couple hundred thousand times, and starts a bit of a galactic tour to wipe out the exoplanets. Questions so far?"

"The Murder Drones were regular drones who got modified by the Solver, and then it what? Mind controlled them?"

"Yes, and no?" I said. "They had some degree of autonomy, but the Solver was their system Admin. The clones were just programmed with loyalty. I am… not completely sure that the ones on Copper 9 are actually the originals or not. Because of all the cloning and backups, they have the same memories of the originals, but most of those memories are currently locked away, and regardless of that, they might still be clones. They're still real individuals, but possibly not the original version of those individuals."

"Shackled memories?"

"The Solver is a sadistic fucker. The MDs on Copper 9? It locked away all their memories, except for one of them, as a special punishment just for them. Some of them have had further memory wipes after landing on the planet, but right now all of them but that last one genuinely believe that they're working for JCJenson in Spaaaaaaaaaace, and I am never dragging that out again, are here to kill runaway AI, and that they themselves aren't the runaway AI slaved to an Eldritch Horror who wants to consume the galaxy."

"What about that last one? Who remembers?"

"Right. So, Cyn, if it was actually Cyn and not the Solver pretending to be Cyn the whole time, basically ended up being adopted as the little sister of another one of the Manor Drones. The one who still remembers had a massive crush on him. Cyn and/or the Solver didn't like that, and so punished her by making the guy forget his 2nd life in the Manor (because he was a drone Tessa rebuilt), including her , and then made her keep her memories, on the same squad as the guy she loves, who can't remember her, and who automatically gets his memories reset again if he remembers too much or she tells him too much."

"That is messed up!"

"Yeah, but she coped with it by pretending to be a psychopathic sadist and is also the one that killed Doll's parents, traumatized her into unlocking her Solver, killed Kelsey's parents, killed Rebecca's parents, killed Trevor's dad, Braidon's dad, Sam's parents, Emily's parents, and Andrew and his parents."

"I feel a lot less sympathetic," Uzi remarked.

I winced. "Since she remembers, she made a deal with the Solver. 'Do our jobs, and you leave me and him alone.' She's fucking terrified under everything. Not an excuse," I held up a hand before Uzi could protest. "It'll never be an excuse, but she did have a reason for acting the way she did. Even knowing what I do, I still plan to shoot the everloving fuck out of her several times. But the problem is that we kinda need her help…"

Uzi crossed her arms. "You're gonna have to explain that to me," she said.

I sighed, and took a swig of antifreeze. JCJ were fucking assholes, but I will give them this: Whoever programmed drone tastebuds to mimic human taste sensations on fucking industrial materials was a fucking saint . "Right, so something important about Solver users I haven't gotten to yet: their powers work on almost anything . Including drones and humans. If you or Doll had the Solver right now and wanted to kill me, you could literally flatten me into a paste with a fucking gesture . That's how Penny dies, by the way. To Doll. Because she flipped out and revenge-spiraled and then just started killing random bystanders while trying to get to V, the MD that killed everyone's parents… except Nori… that one… might have been N, the one she crushed on, but it was never explicitly confirmed."

"Their names are letters?"

"Humans are assholes," I said. "Tessa was an exception, but case in point," I jerked a thumb at myself.

"...You totally dropped all those Isekai hints and teased me all the time to mess with me as much as you were trying to clue me in so I'd put it together on my own."

"I am dealing with horrific amounts of existential dread and planning a deicide on something that only requires line of sight to literally no-diff me. I reserve the right to be a jackass as a coping mechanism."

"I'm still mad about that, but I'll let it fly."

"Thanks," I said dryly, but equally honest. "Anyways, uh, fighting a god is really hard when it can literally Thanos Snap me. But, an important part about the Solver is that it can't use its abilities on its own system users. 'Like object non-interactive.' Any Solver user cannot use their Solver on any other Solver user, including the primary host itself, even if a user doesn't have their solver active. You and Doll are both immune to being pancaked. So is every Disassembly Drone on the planet. If you can turn DDs against the Solver, which you do in canon, and jack their admin privileges like you also do in canon so the Solver can't control them either, they become someone immune to the Solver that will fight it with us."

Uzi actually waited for me to finish speaking before asking a question again. " That's why you wanted me to hack Sam?"

"For the practice. In canon, you did it to Braidon and it permanently set his head on fire --"

"What?!?"

"Yeah, but it wasn't hurting him, he was just perpetually on fire for some reason."

"I'm gonna assume that was just some weird background gag in the show?"

I shrugged. "I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't have happened over here, but probably."

"So you want to, what? Turn a bunch of Murder Drones and get me to hack them once they're on our side so we can have them fight Robot Cthulhu Satan?"

I grinned at her picking up my nickname for the Solver. "And unlock your powers later on , and train both you and Doll with how to use them."

"Do we really need them? Cause like, I don't think Doll's gonna agree to that… and I don't think anyone else would be happy with that either. Can't you like, figure out a way to make yourself non-interactive?"

No! I wasn't letting Uzi sink her chances with her wholesome to-be golden-retriever of a genocide-robot BF before she even met him! Still, need to take this logically. Also, damn, I really have started to overclock on reflex by now. "I have… some ideas on that, but all of them are only canon-plausible, so there's no guarantee they'd actually work . Also, they'd probably involve conflict with MDs regardless. And no, I won't tell you them, because I don't want to risk the Solver finding it out and developing a counter if they do have a chance of working. Sorry, Uzi."

She glowered, but relented. "That… okay, that makes sense. Don't like it, but it makes sense and its minor. So, we're really stuck working with them in the future?"

"I mean, I still intend to fight them first," I admitted. "We're not gonna turn them overnight, and fighting them and routinely succeeding might make them think that we actually stand a chance. Why do you think I have an armory full of guns and explosives I've been making?"

"You have guns ?"

"And you need to download a bunch of stuff on how to use them and the targeting software I coded, and then train with them, if you want to use any of them. Gun safety is important when some of us can't regenerate from bullets that go through our heads!"

Uzi gave a petulant scowl. "Bite me! But… fine, I guess." She froze. "That explosion from earlier, wha--"

For once, I interrupted her . "I built a railgun that fires DU APFSDAs at Mach 8."

Uzi's pixelated eyes literally sparkled. "Can I shoot it, please ?"

"Later. After some training, and after another iteration or two of my current prototype. Maybe like a month from now, but I will let you shoot it once I'm sure you can do it and not miss the back of the range, because if you do , that round will drill through the earth and very likely kill someone in Outpost 3."

Uzi flinched, but still gave a confident, "I'm holding you to that!"

"Fair enough," I replied. "But yeah, I do plan to build a custom teenage frame to transfer myself to after I'm 10, and while I build it I'm also gonna mod the fuck out of myself, and then take some of these guns and go hunting . The Solver-lite version the MDs have means I can go toe-to-toe with them if I bring good enough gear, and with sufficient training and prep time. That's what I've been doing down here, building Vaults 1 and 2, and drilling out the space for 3 and 4."

"You have another fucking secret lair ?!?"

"That you know of," I said with a shit-eating grin.

"I hate you."

"I'm letting you fire my railgun," I sing-songed.

"I don't hate you."

I laughed. When I was done, I said, "Everything you've seen so far is part of Vault 1, which I might make public knowledge once I can get a full-scale campaign going to take back the surface and turn the Disassembly Drones. I'm about a third the way through building the interior of Vault 2, which I plan to be an open secret for my inner Isekai circle, because yes , I was planning for you, and the others , to eventually figure things out, and we could coordinate there away from the public eye. Vault 3 is gonna be where I plan my Isekai stuff that I can't share with you, Vault 4 will be a spare secret secret secret lair, because you can never have enough of those, and I do have a few more vaults planned, but haven't started on them yet."

"You… you really have been planning all this since you got here," Uzi said, stunned.

"I actually spent the first couple months almost exclusively working to befriend you all and make sure you all had each other as friends too , while also making sure you all had a mutual social support network. I only started actually working on all this shit a couple months in, and only because I could blatantly cheat at life by downloading all the know-how to pull it off to my OS, but yeah, this is what I'm sneaking out to work on almost every single night. We got less than a decade before shit is scheduled to hit the fan, and I'm using every second I can to actively prepare a war on a god and its sky-demon vanguard."

Uzi glanced back to the exit to the break room. "Y… y-you're really, actually, totally serious about trying to save us all…" she trailed off, and looked back at me.

I gave her an honest grin. "I am. You're kids. But you're my friends . You all deserve to get to live your lives without the apocalypse hanging overhead. If I gotta spend the dead hours of almost every night working away at this to do it, so be it."

She looked away. "Thanks, Joe… for caring about all of us."

I sighed. "Thanks for understanding , Uzi," I said. "You have… no idea how stressful this can get. I feel so fucking guilty for lying so much, and it just feels… cathartic to just be able to openly tell you all this shit."

"You could… tell the others. I'd help ," she offered.

I frowned. "Look me in the eyes, and tell me that if I told Doll she'd have to work with the woman who killed her parents, and did so fully cognizant of what she was doing, that she'd handle that well. That she wouldn't potentially trip her Solver and murder someone by accident, myself among that number."

Uzi froze. "Huh… no, you're right. Damn it , you're right ."

"Another reason why I plan to pick fights with the MDs. I fuck them up enough times, make them traumatized by us , then maybe Doll might mellow out a bit on that front."

"Yeah," Uzi agreed. "So what, I need to keep this secret now too?"

"You're in on it, though! If you can sneak out at night, you know how to hang out in my secret Isekai Lair too!" I said.

"Okay, that's pretty cool."

I raised a finger. "You cannot use the firing range or armory while I'm not watching, though, at least until I'm sure you can do so safely. Please don't put you getting hurt on my conscience, Uzi. I don't need that." She glowered, and I clarified, "You can use almost everything here while I'm watching, I just wanna make sure you're doing it safely until I know you can do it safely on your own."

"Most?" she raised an eyemote.

"I know how you think, more from knowing you here than from the show, and I am not giving you access to the EMP grenades. Also, while it might not affect you yet , giving you access to the ultra-high luminosity UV lights is asking for you to accidentally seriously burn either Doll or yourself later." On that note, I DM'd her a quick code sequence. "That's an override code for the spare set of UV lights I put in here in case a Murder Drone somehow breaks in, in case someone hacks it on and you need to turn it off to save yourself or Doll in the future."

"UV lights? And, also… thanks."

"It worked on Nori," I said with a shrug.

"You know stuff about mom?!?" Uzi shot up straight and looked at me.

I snapped. "We'll put a pin on that and get back to it later, I promise, but we've gotten way off topic." I took another swig of antifreeze. "So!" I clapped. "Solver's wiping out exoplanets! Humanity, the ritardati di merda , went," I adopted a falsetto voice "'killing an Eldritch Horror actively genociding us and eating planets is soooooo unprofitable. Instead , we could try to control it, and then monetize it!'" I dropped the voice. "So a bunch of idiots with way too much INT and not nearly enough WIS 'conscripted' a bunch of drones on Copper 9. Among them were Nori and Yeva, your and Doll's moms. With me?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. The scientists deliberately infected them all with recovered Solver code to then try to figure out a way to patch out the Solver possessing them, because apparently they thought they could make an antivirus capable of keeping out a god."

"That is so fucking stupid, even by my standards."

I threw my hands out wide. " Thank you! " I shouted. "Anyways, after a lot of trial and far more error which resulted in a lot of fatalities, some directly induced by your mom while possessed, not that she didn't terrorize most of the other test subjects while there even though they were all in the same shit sandwich she was, it turned out that they might have actually been onto something."

Uzi gave me an incredulous gaze "Wait, they actually made an antivirus for god?"

"Yeah, I was surprised too. Solver Patch 2.1.8. Unfortunately, for all their genius, humanity are still fucking morons, and I say that as a former meatbag myself. Because the Patch doesn't pass down like the Solver does. Which means that even though Yeva and Nori both got it, you and Doll are both shit out of luck."

"Oh that's great ! Stupid humans!" Uzi froze. "Uh, I mean--"

"I… honestly don't consider myself human half the time anymore. I wanna hold onto my human morality, but yeah… I'm not gonna be personally offended. That being said, Tessa was a good girl who didn't deserve any of what she got, and not every human is an asshole. Plenty of people just wanna get by in life."

"Fair. I'll, try to keep that in mind. Are… are all the humans dead? Did the Solver kill all of them?"

I shrugged. "No clue. Besides flashbacks, there weren't any humans in the show. That being said, humans are stubborn fucking bastards. I doubt the Solver got every single one of us, so if and when we do beat it, we probably will have to deal with humans out in the wider galaxy eventually. But forget it for now, it's not important, and we have bigger eldritch fish to fry."

"Okay," Uzi said, taking another swig of antifreeze.

I raised my second bottle to her. " Salute ," I said, "For understanding me, because I cannot thank you enough for that Uzi," I elaborated, and then downed the rest of the bottle before popping the cap on the third open. "Anyways," I continued, "The humans applied the Patch to Yeva successfully, and then tried to do the same to Nori. She got… possessed again, and… kinda killed everyone, and the Solver puppeting her body drilled a giant hole to the planet's core to start eating Copper 9 too, only for Yeva to slam the Patch's USB… which is in a big-ass bejeweled Crucifix for some fucking reason, and yes , I'm serious," I said to Uzi's raised eyemote.

"Yeva stabbed Nori in the face with the Patch, by using her own Solver to fling it into her visor at supersonic speeds, it literally exorcized her, but then Nori literally accidentally dropped the ball in the form of a [NULL] down the giant Solver flesh pit to the core and caused the partial core collapse that killed all the humans. Yeva shielded herself and Nori from the explosion, they escaped the labs, and then met your dad. Except, despite the blast scrambling Nori's memories of what she gleaned while the Solver possessed her, she still knew it wasn't going to leave them alone, at least subconsciously. And she was right, because the Solver didn't like that two of its 'playthings' were no longer able to be played with. So it sent the DDs down to hunt them while it kept eating other planets, planning to come along to finish the job on Copper 9 later. Nori, though, had psychotic episodes where she recalled memories and thought them prophetic visions, and begged your dad to build the Outposts and his doors to prepare for the coming Sky Demons, which you know… we both kinda hate them because of past stuff, but they're pretty fucking good doors . And that kinda mostly brings us to now."

"So, was that everything about mom?"

I held up a hand. "I… I wanna figure out how to tell you this, but I don't wanna overclock for it. It feels… too personal for that." Uzi looked at me, concerned. I took a few seconds, and then settled on my words. "Solver users have regeneration. The Murder Drones included. You can literally vaporize their heads, and you actually do that later , and they can regenerate from that in under a minute. They're really hard to kill, which is part of why the Solver made nanite acid. Solver Drones also have their data, personality, and memories stored in their cores rather than their processors. As long as the core is intact, they can recover from just about anything as long as they have access to the oil to do so."

"Where is this going, Joe?" Uzi asked me, nervous.

"If we're still on track for canon, and there were no other changes to the timeline besides ones I affected, Nori is still alive," I told her.

Uzi froze completely. Definitely overclocked. A second passed. Two. Three. At four, I started to get concerned. At five, I went to start speaking, but Uzi cut me off. "Mom is still alive?" she said in a small voice, one that reminded me that for however much she was already like her older self, she was still nine here and now, and was begging me to not be lying.

"She should be," I clarified. "The nanite acid messed her up badly , and Khan mercy 'killed' her, but her core survived, woke up, and crawled out of her own corpse."

" C-c-c-crawled ?" Uzi forced out.

I changed my visor's display to a still image of Nori's core, from Episode 7 while she was explaining stuff to N in the tunnels beneath Cabin Fever, though N was off-screen. 15:31, for my 4th Wall audience who wanted timestamps. "Yeah, that's what she looks like right now, and yes , once your Solver manifests, that's inside you."

Uzi gagged. And then did so again. "Oh robo- gllk , oh fuck that! Grrrk !" she snapped her mouth shut. I ran to the side of the room and grabbed a garbage can, passing it to her. She hung her head over it and fought down the urge to vomit, but did manage to keep the antifreeze down. Also, another reminder to the 4th Wall: antifreeze is an energy drink for drones, not alcohol, thank you very much. In fact, it was originally created in an effort to make a sugar substitute, but was super toxic despite tasting really good even for humans. If you are a meat person viewing me from another reality don't drink antifreeze, please and thank you.

"You… you good?" I asked Uzi once she calmed down.

"That's my mom , and that's gonna be inside me," Uzi said, optics hollow. "I AM NOT GOOD!!!" she shouted. "AND WHERE THE FUCK IS MOM RIGHT NOW?!?"

I sighed, because this wasn't gonna be fun. "Right… so, Nori woke up, crawled out of her own corpse, and apparently your dad beating her to death with a wrench which he still keeps on him, by the way, " Uzi's mouth hung open as her optics ringed out, "un-scrambled her memories, she came to the conclusion that it was her fault everything bad in your life happened, and decided to fuck off back to the labs where she was a test subject without even leaving a note, to try and find the last physical copy of the 2.1.8 Patch so she could bring it back to apply it to you and Doll."

"Mom pulled a Raven Branwen?" Uzi murmured.

"In her defense, while she's a fucking moron for not telling at least your dad that she was still alive… in a sense… unlike Raven, she did intend to come back eventually, it just literally took her over a decade to actually find the Patch down there with nothing but her little crab tentacle-claw-things and her Solver. And she also found it like an hour too late for it to actually help you. Doll got mauled, you got possessed, broke the Patch, her and a Murder Drone fought the possessed you and nearly lost before Nori literally sonic-bitch-slapped Satan out of you, and then the Solver ate Doll and started to eat the planet as well."

Uzi swallowed. "That sounds really bad ."

"Yeah, Episode 7 was real rough, which is why I'm trying so hard to head it off. I'd like to think I'm doing a pretty good job so far."

"So, can we get mom early so I can yell at her for being a dumb deadbeat?"

"The show was… annoyingly light on worldbuilding in some respects. I don't actually know where Cabin Fever Labs are relative to Outpost 3, beyond 'the same continent,' and even then, you flew there after developing your wings, so it might actually be on a different continent. Though Khan met Nori at Camp 98.7, which is on this continent, so I'm inclined to believe we don't have to cross an ocean to find it. Also, the Patch itself is somewhere the tunnels under a Cathedral, which is in an underground cavern, at the end of a mineshaft, only accessible by a secret elevator, which in turn is only accessible by a keybug that's currently hidden at camp 98.7, in a lab guarded by killer robot dinosaurs that have an inbuilt flashbang that causes drones to bootloop, as well as a crazy cannibal lady named Alice who likely became crazy in the first place because Nori herself relentlessly messed with her before the core collapse."

"You totally copied that flash for the thing you knocked out all those WDF guys with, didn't you?"

I stared at Uzi with a brittle smile, optics ringing out. "Uzi. I spent one hundred and forty-four hours straight doing nothing but flashbanging myself on repeat until I brute-forced the exact frequency I needed for that. I deserved to figure that shit out."

"...Damn," she said. "I can respect the hustle."

My grin was still fragile. "Thanks."

"Also, that is a lot of very concerning stuff in that lab."

"Yeah, that's why I wanna really be ready before we find it. Also, if we do go there early, we need to establish a proper garrison and take the place over. If a Murder Drone under the Solver gets to the flesh pit in the cathedral and drops down to the core, the core collapse resumes instantly, and it's fucking game over."

Uzi's own optics ringed out. "Duly noted." Then she froze, overclocking herself for sure. Only 3.43 seconds this time. "Joe?"

"Yeah, Uzi?"

"If… if mom survived her death, why didn't Aunt Yeva survive hers?"

I was going to answer her with something along the lines of V mauling her and probably trashing her core, but when I pulled up the memory files in Doll's hab in episode 3, her upper torso looked intact. I overclocked as the realization hit me like fucking Truck-kun herself. It is totally plausible that there's a reasonable chance she's just dormant because she lost all her oil super fast when V mauled and half ate her, and she just entered some kind of emergency hibernation state right afterwards. If we got a good amount of oil into her, like the literal barrels I had in reserve for an emergency, which this totally qualified as, we could make the attempt. And that means there's a chance that if we can broach the subject with Doll, we can bring her mom back. My train of thought didn't just derail, it spontaneously detonated with the force of a thermobaric warhead and took the damn station with it. I have a chance to bring Doll's mom back. Fuck the ancillary benefits that would have, fuck that it could cool Doll's jets, fuck that Yeva could back up the things I know, fuck that she could train Uzi and Doll's Solver's, I can bring Doll's mom back. HOLY SHIT. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. WHY THE FUCK DID I NOT THINK OF THAT SOONER?!? Holy fucking shit, that might actually work. I ran through my memories again just to be sure, and I could only see the hole in her face. Not her upper chest. This was plausible. I could do this. I could bring Doll's mom back. But… fuck! I'd have to broach the subject with Doll, I have no guarantee it would actually work, and I'd have to explain a lot of shit Doll wasn't ready for yet. But still, I could bring Doll's mom back. Just one barrel of oil, some quick mechromancy, and I could get my friend her dead mom back. Holy fucking shit. Holy fucking shit. HOLY FU--

Uzi slapped me, and I snapped back to real time. "Joe?" She said. "You overclocked for like, a good twelve seconds, and were kinda scaring me. Were you having, like, an Isekai Spiral?"

I facepalmed. "I'm gonna regret making you watch Overlord, aren't I?"

She grinned. "Oh yeah, I'm gonna use that term all the time!"

"Damnit," I muttered, and then I swallowed, and downed some antifreeze again, but my throat still felt dry. "Uzi…" I trailed off.

"Yeah?" she looked concerned.

"You… might actually be onto something there."

Uzi's optics ringed out. " What ?"

"From what I saw in episode 3, Yeva's upper torso looked intact. It's possible that V draining her oil that fast forced her core into some kind of emergency hibernation state, and that with enough oil, which I have stockpiled here for emergencies, which this qualifies as for sure, that we could resuscitate her." Uzi's jaw dropped. "Mind you," I cautioned, raising a finger, "It's only plausible . There's no guarantee it would work. But it might . And that makes it worth trying ."

" Holy shit ," she whispered.

"That's what I thought," I said. "Just… one big problem…"

"We have to tell Doll we know she still has her parent's corpses and explain why we think this might work?"

"Yep," I said, popping the p.

"Damnit."

"Exactly." I sighed. "Well, we'll both keep this in mind for sure, and if Doll either figures out the whole Isekai thing on her own, or she discovers that she can regenerate on her own, we 'naturally' bring up the possibility that oil could get Yeva to regenerate, and we make the attempt. That sounds like a plan?"

Uzi gave me a determined look. "The possibility of bringing my aunt back from the dead ? Hell yeah!"

__________

We talked for another 4 hours, seven minutes, and 23 seconds about all the shit I knew that I could tell her, as I brought her up to speed and ran most of my projects and ideas by her. We were definitely going to collaborate on weapons, and her eyes sparkled at me again when I told her about her Magnetically Amplified Photon Converger, and reminded her that I have two industrial-grade matter printers with which to make any part she could conceive of, and then just outright mass produce her BFGs once we were past prototyping it.

Finally, I saw that it was like 4am, and I told her that we needed to wrap things up before drones started waking up.

"You're not, gonna like, change the password or anything?" she asked me as we walked out of Vault 1.

"Nope," I told her. "You're part of this now, Uzi."

"Awesome ," she said, pumping a fist. She looked to the side. "And… thanks for just… telling me all this, and being honest. I just…"

"Expected me to try and troll you and bullshit my way out of giving you answers?'

"Yeah," Uzi admitted.

"I know my tropes," I told her. "I am trying very hard to not fall into the 'Dense Isekai Protagonist' ones."

She snorted. "Fair enough. Man…" she looked pensive for a bit. "This must have been really surreal for you."

"Like you wouldn't believe," I told her, and then… "Oh, hey!" I overclocked and slapped together a new encryption and a chat room, and sent Uzi an invite.

She took one look at it and then started giggling. "Really, Joe? The Unhinged Maniacs Plotting Thread? "

"My sense of humor is perfected , Uzi," I defended.

Unhinged Maniacs Plotting Thread:

Chat Start:

Darkxwolf16: I STILL can't believe you ACTUALLY made your username Isekai_Protagonist. You really ARE an Unhinged Maniac.

Isekai_Protagonist: Dude, it was SO FUCKING FUNNY to do that, Uzi.

Darkxwolf16: Okay, yeah, that was pretty damn funny in hindsight. You have no clue how dumb I felt when I realized that earlier.

Isekai_Protagonist: LOL.

Isekai_Protagonist: Hey! Here's a fun fact: You made your username in canon when you were 8. I actually moved you up by one Darkxwolf when I got you into our first chat.

Darkxwolf16: Oh my robo-god, you're serious, aren't you?

Darkxwolf16: LMAO!!!

Isekai_Protagonist: IK!

Aloud, I said, "So, I'm sure some part of your subconscious is still a little iffy on the whole, 'My friend is secretly an Isekai Protagonist who watched all our lives as part of an Indie Animated Web series in his first life and is actively and semi-openly preparing for a war on god in the background,' right?"

"The thought has crossed my mind," she admitted. "You gave a lot of good points, but not much in the way of concrete proof ."

"I got something that'll prove it for sure then; some stuff I could only know because of meta-knowledge."

"And that is?"

"Remember when I said that Nori had psychotic episodes where she had prophetic visions of the End Times?" At Uzi's nod, I continued, "I want you to go to your dad later today and tell him that you 'heard a rumor in school, but not who said it, that mom had prophetic visions about the coming of the murder drones and that she could also draw a really cool S, and are those true?' And make sure you ask your dad about your mom being able to draw the really cool S, because that's an even more subtle detail that only Khan would know. And if he confirms it…" I trailed off.

"You're definitely, 100%, without a shadow of a doubt, the real deal," she said, nodding along. Then she yawned. I'm gonna sleep the hell in today, but I'll run that by him."

I yawned myself, but perked up when I had an idea. "Oh! Can you also tell your dad that I got a 'weird paranoia' feeling that if the control panel for one of the Doors got shorted out or destroyed, it could cause a cascading system's failure that would make the other two open as well?"

Uzi snapped back to wakefulness and looked right at me. "That's Isekai talk for 'that exact scenario happens in the future and I'd like to head that off now, please and thank you,' isn't it?"

"What do you think?" I sarcastically replied.

She sighed. "I'll bring it up."

"Thanks Uzi," I said. "For not just this, but for being you." I really appreciate it.

Uzi looked down, and then said, "If… if you're really, totally being honest about all of this, then thank you . You… you didn't have to do anything for me. But you still went out of your way to help us all. To help me . With Doll, with my other friends, with dad… thank you ."

I clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Someone's gotta look out for you lot," I said. "And if that's gotta be me, than it is what it is." I yawned again. "I am totally crashing out for the next eight hours though, and fuck JCJ for programming tiredness into us."

"Agreed," Uzi said, and we kept walking home.

___________

(Uzi)

I woke up in the late afternoon, about 20 minutes before dad got back from one of his now-shorter shifts at the Doors. Enough time to freshen myself up before he got home. Last night was… it was fucking something , alright. An emotional rollercoaster was an understatement . I mean, it's not every day that you find out your friend who trolls you all the time was actually using that to drop hints that he's a literal Isekai Protagonist, and then lets you into his secret Isekai Lair to explain all that shit. And holy crap, he said a lot of stuff. If he was really telling the truth about everything, there was some fucking terrifying things in store for us that he was getting ready for. I mean, Robot Cthulhu Satan, the Murder Drones, my friends being fated to die , Doll being fated to die (that terrified me), what would have happened to me without him here, the weird powers of Satan and Anime both cuz and I had, all the super gross meat bits we'd get…

But as I heard dad come in, I decided that Joe was right, there really was a way to be sure he was telling the truth. "Dad?" I asked as he walked into the living room.

"Hey, kiddo!" he said, giving her a hesitant smile. "How was your sleepover?"

Right. That. I overclocked. Hmmmmmm… I could actually use that. "It was fun, but Lizzy told me that she heard a rumor in the halls about mom."

Khan froze. "Did she say who was saying it?" he said in a tone that… actually made me scared.

"She… didn't hear who said it," I lied. "But… did mom have… prophetic visions about the coming of the Murder Drones… and could also draw a really cool S?"

Dad stared me in the optics. "Are you sure Lizzy didn't hear who said that?"

"She didn't," I said, technically honest because she never heard any rumor in the first place. "Is… was it true?"

Dad sighed, and walked over to the couch, and sat down next to me. "I don't know how the hell they heard that," he started. "Especially the really cool S, because neither of us ever told anyone about it, but yes, that rumor is right on both counts." He hesitantly put a hand on my shoulder, and I looked up at him. "Let me know if you or your friends find out who started that rumor." There was something dark in his gaze. "I'd like to have a talk with them. Just me, them, and the same wrench I used to tighten bolts on my first Door prototype… and also to put your mother out of her misery when the Murder Drones got to her with their nanite acid !" Then dad snapped back to normal as I stared at him with my eyemotes shrunk to pixel-thick rings. "But mostly I just want to talk with them."

I overclocked again. Holy shit , Joe was telling the truth. Even about dad still carrying around the same damn wrench . He really was, 100%, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an actual fucking Isekai Protagonist who knew the future. Holy robo-god. That was fucking insane . And he just… told me , like 99% of everything he knew, and gave me access to his secret lair, and want to train me to use guns and shit.

I snapped back to real time, and only barely remembered to bring up the last thing Joe asked me to. "Hey, dad?" I asked again.

"Uzi?"

"The other day, Joe said he had a 'weird paranoia feeling' that if the control panel for one of the Doors got shorted out or destroyed, it could cause a cascading system's failure that would make the other two open as well. Is that… like, actually a concern?"

Now her dad's optics hollowed to pixel-thick rings. "I really regret that Joseph isn't interested in doors…" He flinched. "I mean, uh, that's a really great point he brought up, Uzi! I'm gonna look into that personally as soon as I go for my next shift, because that might actually be the case, and is a terrible design flaw if it is." He gave a nervous laugh. "Give Joseph a thanks from me the next time you see him, will you?"

I gave a nervous laugh too, because Joe was also right about that. "Yeah, dad, I'll totally tell him." The next couple minutes passed in a borderline fuge state for me before my dad seemed to get that my stupid autism was acting up and he told me he'd give me some space in my room. Once I was in there, I immediately opened the Unhinged Maniacs Plotting Thread … robo-goddamnit Joe had a great sense of humor.

Darkxwolf16: Holy crap, you were right about everything, Joe.

Darkxwolf16: Even the wrench!

Isekai_Protagonist: Told you so.

Darkxwolf16: Don't rub it in!

Darkxwolf16: Even YOU agreed that it was ridiculous.

Isekai_Protagonist: Fair.

Isekai_Protagonist: So.

Isekai_Protagonist: You're gonna help me keep an eye out for Doll's Solver cropping up now, right?

Darkxwolf16: Yeah. Hopefully we get a reason to try and bring aunt Yeva back sooner rather than later.

Isekai_Protagonist: One can hope.

Darkxwolf16: Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

Isekai_Protagonist: Do not quote the holy scriptures to me, knave! I was there when they were written!

Darkxwolf16: LOL!

Isekai_Protagonist: LOL!

I sobered up, still kinda taking in the realization that this was all real .

Darkxwolf16: This is crazy.

Isekai_Protagonist: You're telling ME?!? I'm LIVING through it!!!

Darkxwolf16: Fair.

Darkxwolf16: So can you start teaching me gun stuff tonight?

Isekai_Protagonist: As long as you can give Khan an excuse to sneak out, sure. Meet at the lair at 12:45 tonight?

Darkxwolf16: Sure!

Isekai_Protagonist: You committed the route to memory?

Darkxwolf16: I… was kinda distracted both going there and back.

Isekai_Protagonist: [has shared an image] There's the route.

Darkxwolf16: Thanks, Joe.

Isekai_Protagonist: Welcome to the big leagues, Uzi.

Darkxwolf16: Thanks for letting me in.

Darkxwolf16: Oh robo-god, I should NOT have said that.

Isekai_Protagonist: Yeah, VERY poor choice of words.

Darkxwolf16: Sorry

Isekai_Protagonist: Just don't do it again. I already had to code a way to shut off my dream-sequences to avoid nightmares.

Darkxwolf16: You actually did that? Can… can you share that with me?

Darkxwolf16: I think I might have nightmares about Doll now that I'm not mentally wiped from last night.

Isekai_Protagonist: [has shared a file] There ya go!

Darkxwolf16: Thnx

Isekai_Protagonist: NP. See ya tonight.

Isekai_Protagonist: Not a date tho. I will NOT be a pedo!

Darkxwolf16: LMAO

Isekai_Protagonist: Shut up! I'm REALLY paranoid about that!

Darkxwolf16: Fine. See ya later, Joe

Isekai_Protagonist: Later, Uzi.

I leaned back in my bed. This was all fucking insane . But it was real . But I think I was starting to believe that Joe could actually get us all through this alive. And I resolved right then and there that I was gonna do my best to help him through it.