Chapter 93: Book 2 Chapter 17: Crisis On Exactly Six Earths

“Bzz. Bzz bzz bz bzzzzz bzz!”

The small flea gestured in the direction of the small crack in reality, pointing at it with one extended forelimb.

“Bzz?”

The moth backed away from the tiny rift, feathery antenna trembling.

“Bzz bzz!”

The tiny, shield-shaped bug at the rear of the group pushed her moth friend forward. Quite reluctantly, the moth pressed forward, flapping it’s wings towards the rift, and eventually, through it.

Vell, who had been observing the rift that had destroyed their reality last loop a little too closely, got a face full of moth as the insect blasted through the rift. He let out a small scream of displeasure, as did the moth. Hawke screamed and ran even further away from the rift.

“Ah! Alien bugs!”

The moth flapped backwards, even further away from the rift.

“Ah! Alien humans!”

Hawke and moth both ceased their retreats.

“What?”

“What?”

“Oh, look at that,” Lee said. “That rift must connect to dimension three.”

“And this must be dimension five,” said the flea, as it likewise strolled through the rift. Now that they were under the effect of the Einstein-Odinson school’s translation spell, the bugs unintelligible buzzing was transmuted into very telligible buzzing. Flea made several massive leaps and bounds, eventually landing on the table nearest to Lee.

“I presume you are the leader of this particular group of dimensional counterparts, ma’am?”

“You presume correctly,” Lee said with a stiff curtsy. While an unnaturally large flea would usually be a problem for Lee, this one was being very polite. “May I presume the same of you?”

“Of course. Flea, at your service.”

“Lee, pleasure to meet you.”

Hawke waved at the moth, who flailed one of it’s multiple limbs back at him.

“Hi, I’m Hawke.”

“Oh hey, I’m Hawkmoth.”

The shield bug at the rear of the group waded it’s way through just as Harley was about to make her introductions.

“I’m Harley,” she said.

“And I’m Murgantia!”

Vell looked between the shield bug and Harley for a second.

“That...doesn’t really match up.”

“It’s probably some bug pun, we’ll google it later,” Harley said.

“Maybe you’re a human pun,” Murgantia said accusingly.

“That comes down to a very complex discussion on metaphysics I’m not prepared to have right now,” Harley said. “Come on, I think we were just getting to the exposition.”

“Yes, I was just about to explain the details of the dimensional rift,” Lee said, gesturing to the small hole in reality at the edge of the classroom they now occupied. “Unless of course you’d like to take charge, Flea?”

“No, please, go ahead, this is your dimension after all.”

Flea hopped into a seat near Vell as they all took places for Lee’s explanation. Hawke and Harley both sat next to their bug-dimension duplicates, while Kim and Vell, conspicuously free of doppelgangers, sat next to each other.

“Right. Now, as I was saying -and as our compatriots here have clearly demonstrated- this small gap is a rift from one layer of the multiverse to another.”

“Okay, wait, don’t just gloss past the fact that the multiverse is real,” Hawke said. “You mean all those theories are true? There’s an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of possibilities?”

“Well, uh...no, dear,” Lee said. “They’re not infinite. There’s six, to be exact.”

“Six?”

“Yes.”

“Six doesn’t seem like much of a multiverse,” Hawke said.

“Six is multiple,” Murgantia said. Hawke had no response to that.

“Indeed. There’s universe one, The Void, which is, as the name suggests, nothing but the Void,” Lee said. “Then there’s universe two, the Gloobiverse-”

“Gloobiverse?”

“It’s complicated,” Lee said. “And universe three is where our bug friends are from.”

“Huh. So do you guys treat humans the way we treat bugs?”

“It’ll be better for us both if I don’t answer that question,” Murgantia said.

“Indeed, let’s continue,” Lee said. “Universe four is a lot like ours, except there’s no magic or super science in it, so far as we can tell.”

“None at all?”

“No,” Lee said. Hawke’s brow furrowed.

“Wait, so they have all of the rampant environmental carelessness, crony capitalism, war, inequality, and suffering we have, but they don’t have teleportation or jetpacks?”

“Nope.”

“Good lord, that must be miserable,” Hawke said.

“I can only imagine,” Lee said. “Now, universe five is our home. The last piece of the multiverse is universe six, a distorted nightmare of non-euclidean geometry and horrifying spacial distortion so alien to our conception of reality that no words in any language have the means to describe it.”

“Not even ours,” Flea said. “And we got words for some weird shit.”

“Sometimes literally,” Murgantia said. “Dung beetles like to be very specific about what they’re rolling.”

“Fascinating,” Kim said flatly. “Why is that relevant to anything happening right now?”

“It’s not, really, I just happen to know a lot of dung beetles and-”

“I was talking to Lee,” Kim said. She didn’t want to hear anything else about dung beetles today. “How does knowing about all the different dimensions help us solve the hole in reality?”

“Flea, do you want to take this one, since you’re already underway?”

“I may as well,” Flea said. She hopped out of her seat and back up to the head of the classroom, as Lee stepped aside to let her take charge. “Now, I’ve already explained this to my fellows insects, but for the benefit of you humans: An inter-dimensional rift such as the one we just traveled through is the result of a frayed quantum strand, a sort of loose thread in the fabric of reality. Much like a literal thread, the best way to fix it is to pull it taut and close the loop.”

Kim paused for a second to download the necessary sewing knowledge to understand that metaphor.

“So...you have to loop through the other dimensions to fix this, then?”

“Oh, not us, ‘we’,” Flea said. “The rift connects both our realities. If you don’t also travel through the dimensions, your native reality will slowly degrade and eventually fall apart.”

“Ah.”

“Not to worry, we’ve come prepared.”

Flea reached to the back of her carapace and withdrew a large metal drone seemingly from nowhere. Large by the standards of a supernatural flea, at least. The drone was about the size of a thumbtack by human standards.

“Our trusty robot assistant D.I.M. should be able to open some stable gateways for all of us,” Flea said. Kim’s eyes narrowed at the tiny drone. She wondered if that counted for her doppelganger and, if so, why Vell still didn’t have one.

“It’s nice to have someone else doing the legwork for once,” Harley said. “Normally I’d be working all afternoon to set us up with an interdimensional portal.”

“I know the feeling,” Murgantia mumbled.

“Give us a moment to get ready and we’ll follow you to the next dimension,” Lee said. Flea gave a bug salute and prepped D.I.M. for travel. Lee went to retrieve some spell components for a mobile translation spell, oxygen supplies, and snacks, leaving her fellow loopers to face their counterparts.

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“So. You guys have your own loop and everything?”

Vell couldn’t help but be curious, given the circumstances. Murgantia shook from side to side.

“Nah, we don’t have a time loop like you guys. Still have to deal with disasters, though” she said. Flea had explained the history of the loopers and the bug squad before they’d traversed the planes. The disastrous tendencies of both dimensions meant this was not the first time the two realities had intersected, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

“Oh, shit, are you, uh, going to crazy now that I’ve mentioned the time loops?”

“Nah, we don’t live in your dimension so the time loop stuff doesn’t affect us. It’ll be fine.”

“Okay, good,” Vell said. “Though, if it’s not time loop stuff, where do your disasters come from?”

“The humans cursed us before we...uh...before they...all moved to Australia.”

The three humans in the room, and the one humanoid robot, stared blankly at Murgantia. If Flea had been biologically capable of sweating, she would have done so.

“So, uh, anyone want to hear an explanation on how your unique universal resonance makes this entire dimension-healing trip work?”

“If I have to hear you say ‘quantum’ one more time I’m going to scream,” Hawkmoth said.

“You should probably do some screaming now just to get it out of your system,” Vell suggested. “Things like this usually end with us saying quantum a lot.”

“Good idea, human,” Hawk Moth said. Then he started screaming, which to Vell mostly sounded like a very far away whistle. He didn’t even know moths could scream, so that was more than he’d expected.

“While you’re already screaming, you might keep in mind our first stop is going to be the non-euclidean hell dimension,” Flea suggested. “Throw some extra screams in there for good measure.”

“Now I kind of want to scream too,” Hawke said.

“Go for it.”

He did.

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The dimensional portal ejected human and bugs alike, and they collectively fell into a heap on the first surface they came into contact with.

“Jesus christ,” Harley groaned, as she clutched at her eyes. “I think I’m a little bit blind now.”

Harley had been blinded by impossible colors, Hawke’s ears were fried from trying to process soundwaves on impossible frequencies, and Vell was pretty sure he knew what fuchsia tasted like now.

“Oh, you saw the nonexistent colors too?”

“I think so,” Harley said. “Fucking hell, I’m not sure if it was color or sound.”

“Probably neither,” Flea said. “It was a strange and twisted landscape with no physical or metaphysical overlap with our own.”

“Fuck, okay, I don’t wanna think about it anymore,” Harley said. “Who has their brain on straight and can tell us where we are?”

“I’m good,” Kim said. Being an inhuman robot had worked to her advantage for once. She didn’t understand normal reality yet, much less the fucked up non-euclidean reality. “If the weirdo dimension was dimension six, that means we’ve looped back to the beginning, dimension one.”

“Oh hell,” Lee said. She’d read all about this one in her binder, and none of it had been good. ‘The Void.”

“That’s me,” said the Void, his ephemeral consciousness booming at them from every direction at once. “Welcome, strange organic things, hope you’re having a good time, hope everything’s comfortable.”

The sound of the whimpering cosmic voice knocked Harley back to her senses, and she looked around at their surroundings. They were suspended in some kind of inky black gaseous material, which condensed and solidified into a platform below them.

“I’m sorry, what exactly are you?”

“Don’t engage with him, just get D.I.M. going and let’s get out of here,” Flea whispered to Kim.

“No, please, stay a while,” The Void proclaimed. “It’s nice to have company again. It gets lonely being a monolithic universe spanning entity, you know? Just me in here! Alone! Forever!”

The coiled mass of inky material solidified even further below them. Hawk Moth took to the sky in horror as he realized he was perched on the “body” of The Void itself, only to realize that the air was also just an extension of The Void.

“Sorry Mr. The Void, but we have to save our universes, and that means we gotta go,” Kim said.

“Oh, sure, cool, okay, perfectly understandable,” The Void boomed. “But hey, before you go, maybe just spit somewhere? Or something else? Leave some microbial lifeforms behind that could maybe evolve into new life to keep me company.”

“Well, I guess I could-”

Vell was cut off by Flea jumping onto his shoulder and slapping him in the cheek.

“Don’t listen to him,” Flea said. “He doesn’t want company. He just wants you to spit on him because he’s a dirty bird.”

“Oh, gross, dude,” Murgantia said. “Don’t try to trick people.”

“Yeah, consent is sexy,” Harley said.

“D.I.M.’s ready, let’s go,” Flea said. The portal opened and all present started to hurry through it, in spite of The Void’s pleas.

“Wait! Don’t go! It doesn’t have to be spit! Come back and excrete on me!”

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Vell hurled himself through the portal and, to his pleasant surprise, landed on something soft. After a moment of relaxation, he realized this soft thing he’d landed on was also slightly sticky, and he launched himself upwards in disgust, bumping into another soft, slightly sticky thing as he did so.

“Hello interdimensional Gloobi’s,” the soft, sticky thing said.

Vell recoiled for a moment and backed away, even as his feet struggled to move on the slightly adhesive ground. A welcoming committee of three large, human-shaped blobs of greenish-gray material stood and watched as Vell and all his friends emerged from the portal. They had blurred, indistinct outlines, and three large orbs of blue where their faces should have been.

“Welcome to our Gloobi,” the lead blob said, before extending what was it’s closest approximation to a hand. Vell, acting on instinct, shook it, and found the hand to be soft and slightly sticky, just like every other solid surface in this dimension. He tried to hide his discomfort as the blurry entity at the front gestured to itself, and then to it’s companions.

“We’re the locals, I’m Gloobi, and these are my friends Gloobi and Gloobi. And back there is our Gloobi, Gloobi.”

The lead Gloobi pointed further back, where an approximation of the other Gloobi’s, made out of greenish-gray, blurry metal, stood at attention. Kim felt doubly uncomfortable about that one. Hawke scanned the entire crowd, and felt equally uncomfortable about all of it. The existence of the robo-Gloobi implied that this was another multiversal variation of the loopers, like Flea and cohorts, but their Gloobiness made all of the Gloobi’s indistinguishable.

“So...you’re all Gloobi?”

“Everything is Gloobi in our Gloobi.”

Hawke stepped backwards, towards Murgantia.

“How soon until we get out of here?”

“Soon. Have to do a little extra calibration to account for all the Gloobi.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Vell said, already knowing he would regret asking. “What, uh, what exactly is Gloobi?”

“Gloobi cannot be explained, only Gloobi’d,” Gloobi said. “You must Gloobi your Gloobi until Gloobi enters your Gloobi.”

Vell cracked a nervous smile.

“Right. Uh. And you guys...you also have, like, disasters that happen here?”

“Only Gloobi happens in Gloobi.”

Vell was so thoroughly uncomfortable at this point that he accidentally invented an entirely new facial expression. He took his revolutionary new look of discomfort with him as he retreated, alongside the rest of his group of inter dimensional travelers.

“Murgantia, if I don’t get out of here soon I’m going to lose my shit,” Vell said. The Gloobi’s had not followed them, but were still standing around, watching them with Gloobi eyes.

“Oh god, you noticed the air too, did you?” Lee said, shuddering as she spoke.

“The air? What about the air?”

“It’s sticky.”

Vell took a deep breath and regretted it. Lee was right. Just like everything else in the Gloobiverse, the air was ever so slightly sticky.

“Okay, consider my shit lost,” Vell muttered. “Please save me.”

“One more hop and we’re home,” Murgantia said. “You’ll have to go a bit further, of course, so I’ve got to calibrate D.I.M. in advance to take you there and get itself home. I’m sure you’re plenty capable, of course, it’s just built for very tiny hands.”

“Understandable,” Harley said.

“It’ll be just a moment,” Flea assured them.

“Since we got you here, and to avoid engaging mentally or physically with the Gloobi’s in anyway way,” Hawke said. The Gloobi’s were still standing where they had first appeared, motionless and Gloobi-y. “If there’s no time loops in your world, how do you avoid all the disasters?”

“Flea can see the future,” Murgantia said.

“Oh hey, that’s the lie we tell people when they ask us about the loops,” Harley said.

“Interesting. We tell people there’s time loops when they ask us,” Flea said. “We took the idea from your world. Did you get inspiration from us too?”

“No, I just panicked under pressure,” Vell said. Somehow, despite being able to stare down black holes and monstrosities of all kinds, Vell still struggled socially.

“You humans and your anxieties,” Murgantia said. “Good thing we don’t have those.”

“You don’t?”

“Nope! We’re bugs, we discarded those unnecessary emotions for higher intelligence,” Murgantia said. “The lack of fear is probably why we won the war against hum...idity. Humidity. There was too much moisture. In the air.”

Murgantia was not an expert in human facial expressions, but she didn’t think the furrowed brows of all the humans looking at her were good.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to address this before we move on,” Lee said. “Did you exterminate the humans in your dimension?”

Hawk Moth and Flea exchanged nervous glances with multi-faceted eyes.

“Well, not us,” Flea said. “That was generations ago.”

“I’m sure it’s all totally cool now,” Murgantia said. “Most bugs alive today have never even seen a human.”

The dimensional device kicked into full gear, opening a rift to the bugs native dimension. The humans eyed it cautiously, but desperate to escape the Gloobiverse, stepped through. The Gloobiness of the Gloobi’s vanished, replaced by what was, by all appearances, a miniature version of the Einstein-Odinson campus. Miniscule dorms and small classrooms peppered an island that was probably sixty or seventy feet across, end to end. Processions of insects traced lines from building to building -all of them standing in the shadow of the comparatively titanic humans who had appeared in the midst of their school.

“Oh, this is rather-”

“Humans! Kill them!”

“Time to go,” Harley said, as she poked a tiny button on D.I.M. and pushed her comrades through the resulting portal.

“Bye guys, nice meeting you,” Vell said, as he was shoved through the portal. If Flea and company responded, Vell didn’t hear it, because someone was firing a bug-sized missile at the humans. Thankfully the portal snapped shut behind them. Vell hoped that missile wouldn’t cause too many problems in the bug universe. His immediate thoughts for the concerns of the bug dimension became concern for himself when he started to splash into cold water.

After a brief plunge into the salty depths of the sea, Vell reoriented himself and surfaced. His friends were bobbing in the water nearby, disoriented by the plunge into the sea, but quickly recovering.

“Oh right, universe four,” Lee said. “No magic.”

Without any magic, or the advanced technology enabled by it’s existence, this dimension had neither the means nor the reason to build an artificial island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Their dimensional hop had left the loopers stranded in the middle of the ocean, with not a scrap of land in sight.

“You still got D.I.M. running?”

“Yeah yeah, I got it, just give me a second,” Harley said. Operating the pint-sized machine while treading water wasn’t easy for anyone, even Harley. Hawke grabbed on to her so she’d have an easier time floating, and could focus on the machine.

“So, while we’re treading water literally and metaphorically,” Vell said. “You said every universe has it’s own cycle of disasters, right?”

“According to the old looper’s notes, yes,” Lee said. All the dimensions had their own bespoke cycle of disastrous occurrences, though only their native dimension had the Loops there to negate the impact.

“Alright, so we’ve got the time loops, the bug dimension has Flea seeing the future, and I suppose the Void is a disaster of an entity, and the Gloobi’s are...Gloobi,” Vell said. “But when a disaster happens, what do they do here?”

He gestured to the empty expanse of the ocean, and the width of the magicless world they were currently visiting.

“They just live with it, I suppose,” Lee said.

“Jesus christ, all of them?”

“Well, with no magic, their disasters are a bit less disastrous. Forest fires rather than rampaging fire elementals, you know,” Lee said. “But yes, they just have to live with the consequences, I suppose.”

Vell recalled everything he’d lived through in the past year and a half. The chaos of the time loops was only even vaguely manageable thanks to it’s impermanence. If even one-percent of what he’d lived through had been a permanent part of his life, he’d probably have gone insane a long time ago.

“This dimension sucks,” Vell said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Way ahead of you, bud,” Harley said. She opened the portal and they gladly returned to their homeworld, leaving the dreary, magicless reality behind.