Breaking New Ground

Emergency red glow. The lighting situation had changed so suddenly that Char, Varkral and Juror were all nearly completely blinded by the change; their eyes so used to the intensity of the Reaper that its absence had removed all light from the room. Blinking furiously, Char called out.
“Lore! Lore! You still there? Are you alright?” She tried to remember where they were but found that she didn’t even remember where she was as she walked into the console for the second time. It wasn’t long till her eyes began to re-adjust to the new, redder lighting and she saw the aftermath of Lore’s madness. The circle had been destroyed and Lore lie on the ground singed but not too badly damaged. Char ran to them. By the time she had closed that short gap, Lore was already almost to their feet. Char wrapped them in her embrace but Lore was focussed on something else. Out of the window, where only empty space had once been, something impossible floated. Gazing back at them, Earth. While the mirror effect was quickly shattered by the new planet’s uncanny likeness to Lore’s Earth, its presence was still something to behold.
Char was going to say something but she couldn’t. Lore was beaming.
“It’s going to work.” Lore whispered to themselves. They scraped a layer of ash from their shoulder as they retrieved their arm. “Everyone alright?” Lore spoke up.
“What the hell was that?” Juror was helping Varkral to his feet, her eyes locked on the planet orbiting their position.
“That was what I want this station for.” Lore coughed. There was a metallic taste at the back of their throat. “A small taste anyway.”
“Ok… Let me rephrase that: How the hell did you do that?” Char too wanted to know the answer to that question.
“You’ve been storing your dark matter in capacitors right?” Juror nodded. “Well, I emptied them to make a planet. You as the Reaper may have the power needed to kick start the station but we’ve been given that little extra thing, that last piece of the puzzle that allows us greater control.”
“Time.” Char blurted out.
“So what? Same Reaper, same energy.”
“Different time.” Lore spoke with a soft giddiness. “While you only had fractions of seconds to react and deal with what the Holepunch was going to do, I can control Heimdall Station as if it were my arm. I have all the time in the universe to bend the dark matter to my own will.” Juror was going to question the name but didn’t want to spoil the flow.
“And, with the Rejuvinative energy, you can create life.” Char paused. “oh.” She spoke in a similarly soft tone to Lore as if realising the same thing.
“Yeah.” Lore nodded. They looked to Char. They could tell that she hadn’t fully grasped the full weight of this revelation. “We’ve got some work to do though, that blast was way more powerful than I was expecting, we’ve got to completely redesign those emitters.” Lore jumped straight to the console. After a quick reboot that took rather too long for anyone’s liking, they were back in the race. Lore was spiralling. “Come on, come on.” They muttered. “It has to work…” They jumped as Char rested her hand on their shoulder.
“Lore, what has to work? You’ve barely said a word and now you’re making planets. Talk to me.” She leant in closer.
“When we met Time, after we destroyed Crait and Charrlene’s universe, I had an idea. Reality wanted to see the universes beyond ours, he wants to be the best. We have to stop him but there are only three of us. Sure there are people like us but think back to what we’ve achieved. Quatarr back and the universe pulled from the brink of extinction. I had an idea, time doesn’t exist in the void but with enough energy, we could do it.”
“Do what?”
“We are on an inherently self-destructive cycle. The council was created through paradox after paradox, but what if we used that to our advantage, worked together with the power of the other Cornerstones to create a universe of looped time that followed our universes path.” Lore spoke with the passion of a conspiracy theorist.
“We create one universe with a Lore and a Char and eventually they do the same?”
“Exactly. We sow the seeds and eventually, we create a whole ecosystem. In that example we only planted one seed but, I plan on something bigger.” They transferred a file from their Breacher to the computer panel’s screen. “This is the Multiversal Core.” Around the central universe, a ring of fifty two micro universes. “And around it, we create fifty two universes. Fifty two universes in a constant state of destruction and rebirth as they feed into and annihilate one another. Infinite versions of us. We could stop Reality, we could stop all of them.” Lore was starting to scare Char.
“But why? With the Cornerstone’s help and the fact that there will be more of them when we get around to it, we’ll be more than powerful enough to stop them.”
“It’s not just Reality though. Forty nine Lores and Chars laid down their lives so that we may live and now they’re gone. I owe them everything. If I can bring them back, in any shape or form then I have to. Everybody lives.” Lore was on the verge of what most people knew as tears. “Everybody lives.” Tears began to form. There was still something they weren’t telling her.
It happened every night since their fateful encounter with the rift shards. Their scar would burn as they slept and they would feel as though they had been transported somewhere else. It was always as if they were teetering on the edge of sleep and consciousness but they could still feel. The feeling of an impending something, something they didn’t quite have enough experience feeling yet but regardless it was uncomfortable. Since Reality proposed it, they had felt this feeling emanating from beyond the borders of their universe where, without evidence, they knew fifty two identical multiverses lie. That was what they were preparing for, not just to fight Reality but to safeguard their universe from the waves he was unwittingly preparing to let crash upon his creations.
“Let’s get it done then.” Char pulled Lore in closer and dried their eyes. She gave a warm smile. Heaven and Earth.