Chapter Text
The world is over. A battle to create a new world is beginning. And you are far too old to be here.
zygoticQuandary: So, how does it feel to be saving the world?
crypticEmpiricist: Pretty bad actually!
Karen (Qiuyi) Zhao, the zygoticQuandary in question, might have once been your best friend, or perhaps only friend, or perhaps something else altogether. After a series of intense conversations and secret confessions in the last two years of high school, the frequency of your interactions waned, and eventually ceased. The ravages of time, distance, and anxiety seemed to erase whatever good thing the two of you had going. Until now, at the end of the world. It turns out that being obsessed with a certain problematic webcomic during your teenage years is more helpful than you could have imagined.
ZQ: My quest is, literally, "Become death".
ZQ: That message was in my dreams constantly, but I didn't understand what it meant until I stumbled upon the Nuevos Alamos labs.
ZQ: Thus, it means I get to assume my role as the local J. Robert Oppenheimer.
ZQ: It's called the "Land of Fission and Frogs" for a reason...
ZQ: Somehow, and I don't know how, this is going to end up with a frog that ends up creating the new universe, if and only if I succeed at these tasks.
CE: Maybe your dreams aren't exactly a reliable source of information, given the whole horrorterrors thing?
ZQ: I mean this is the only path that I see going forward.
ZQ: It makes sense given everything else that's going on in this land.
CE: So you'll start an impromptu Manhattan Project?
ZQ: Yeah... So like, I'm going have to to build a nuclear bomb. And set up all the infrastructure and stuff like that.
CE: Replicating the quandaries of the old world in the new...
ZQ: lol I'll try not to oppress the iguanas, I guess? Or start a cold war between the kingdoms, or create too many toxic radioactive waste dumps, or something like that...
ZQ: Actually I don't know if there are even multiple countries here, or like anything about consort politics.
ZQ: All I have to do is construct a fission device. It's just an engineering problem, nothing more.
CE: I kind of doubt that, tbh.
Within your Sburb session is a motley yet strangely homogeneous cast of characters. Besides Karen, there are Xu Yingmei and Qi Jiaren, two Chinese college students who grew up in the same town. Karen met Yingmei at a summer research program, and Yingmei then invited her old friend Jiaren to join in. You're not sure about Jiaren, but Yingmei is also a trans woman. Yingmei was quarantined in California, while Jiaren had returned to their hometown of Shijiazhuang. The two of them mostly keep to themselves, not that you've done much to alter the status quo.
ZQ: I've done enough talking for now; so tell me about your quest and stuff...
CE: I don't know yet.
ZQ: Nothing at all?
CE: I don't have much to go on.
As a Knight of Light, your role has never been entirely well defined. There is no "canonical" example for your role within a session, so you have to map your own way through this morass (no matter how much you would like to be, you are not Rose Lalonde). Yours is supposed to be the aspect of knowledge according to some official sources, and luck according to others, but you have never felt less knowledgeable or lucky. Being a "Knight" is supposed to be about serving or protecting others according to the wiki, but you are not in a capacity to serve anyone right now. You do have a laser rifle, which is perhaps some kind of "light", but it does not seem to be directly relevant. You are much better with aiming than you expected, which could be an aspect of your powers or the weapon itself.
Your world is the "Land of Stars and Steel", a labyrinthine locale where the starlight above does not penetrate to the steel caverns below, where the artifacts of a glorious technological civilization lay derelict. You have not encountered a single consort or friendly NPC despite all your searching. But many of the artifacts have turned out to be functional, some quite useful as weapons against the hordes of enemy creatures that infest the caverns. You still do not know what your quest is, but it almost certainly involves a dungeon crawl through the bowels of this world.
CE: Anyway, nukes.
CE: So what kind of nuclear bomb are you making?
ZQ: Good question...
ZQ: First, we have the fission-only devices. There's the Little Boy-style "gun" design, and the Fat Man "implosion" type (also used in the Trinity test), plus some variations of those two. Basically both of these designs involve applying a lot of physical force to a radioactive core in order to catalyze nuclear fission and start a chain reaction.
ZQ: As for thermonuclear devices, there's only essentially one design in our world, the Teller-Ulam design which involves a fission reaction to catalyze a fusion reaction using tritium-deuterium fusion.
ZQ: Sorry you probably know this already...
CE: I did but it's fine...
ZQ: sorry...
ZQ: But I don't know exactly how I will construct my device(s) yet. I know a bunch of useless facts from reading wikipedia and a bunch of random books, but not how to actually apply them. And the consorts have all deferred to my nonexistent expertise. I think the gun design is the simplest. Or just a replica of the Trinity device but that might actually be more difficult.
ZQ: Anyway I'm speaking on virtually no knowledge. There are so many technical challenges here: everything from physics to chemistry to every field of engineering except the one I majored in. I'll have to learn how to use magic in order to address any of them.
ZQ: Sorry, I'm rambling again...
CE: Don't worry, I love hearing your updates.
CE: Feel free to let me know if you need anything, although I think you're far more adept at the whole nuke thing than I would be.
ZQ: Thank you! You can always tell me about things if you'd like too...
ZQ: But I should actually do my quest. Goodbye for now...
In the scanners embedded in your glasses, you see more underlings in the distance. You ready your ancient rifle. The enemies have been simple to dispatch thus far, and there is no reason why that will change now. Karen is good at the game, and can handle herself. Hopefully so can you.
realCrypticEmpiricist: Hello, "Emily".
RCE: We both know that's not your real name.
CE: Who are you?
RCE: I am you from the future.
RCE: Just kidding. I'm you from the present. A different present. A better one. And I am contacting you within this game so that you may avert certain mistakes.
CE: Evidence, please?
RCE: We were born in Austin, Texas, left after fourth grade, and attended *** high school in Massachusetts.
RCE: Dad's name is Song Chen. You might have thought he was unnecessarily cruel, although I think differently. Mom's name is Jing Zhang. You don't speak to her as often as you should.
CE: ...okay?
RCE: You first went back to China when you were seven years old. You got carsick and threw up on your clothes. Your parents and uncle stopped at a store; the only clothes there were girl's clothes so they bought you some. You threw a fit about having to wear girl's clothes, which is as good a sign as any that you are mistaken about the "being a girl" thing.
RCE: Fast-forward to today. You buy "feminine" clothes off amazon.com despite your steadfast belief that amazon is unethical because you do not have the courage to go to a physical store. I would like to say that it's pathetic, but you are me so I would be "telling on myself", as they say.
CE: Who are you and why are you talking to me?
RCE: I want to help you.
RCE: I would like for you to cut through certain illusions you may have about your current situation, to see the truth behind your present state.
You end the conversation and immediately block the so-called "realCrypticEmpiricist".
Of course it doesn't work. The name appears back at the top of your contacts list. You uninstall and reinstall the app. Same thing. You re-install Linux. Same thing.
RCE: I'll always be here, you know.
RCE: I'm always with you.
CE: Can you please stop? Just go away?
RCE: You'll understand what I mean eventually.
RCE: You'll come back. I know it.
Your name is Emily Chen and you have always been alone.
Today you wake up in your childhood home. Your college has forced all students out of the dorms and ended in-person classes, and therefore you are back here, in the house in which you resided between the ages of 10 and 18. It is a nondescript room in a relatively generic house in suburban Massachusetts. The walls are white and undecorated as they always have been, the desk empty, the bed covered with blue striped sheets, and the ceiling adorned with only a bare light bulb. This is obviously not what a "girl's room" would look like; it's obviously a boy's room, anyone would say.
It is your first time back after years away, and you will not jeopardize the fragile peace with your choice of attire.
You would like to think that you "pass" like this, but realistically speaking you probably don't. You have more than a year of HRT under your belt and you still do not usually pass when not using your optimized "female presentation". You do not have noticeable breasts or anything like a "feminine figure" (you imagine quotes around the term because while you reject it as a patriarchal construct, those with power over you do not); normally you could strategize with your wardrobe and makeup and so on, but the present circumstances are not amenable. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you feel like shit. On the other hand, passing as a male means that you do not have to face the crushing reality of being a trans woman IRL for now. Maybe if you can play-act an adequate son long enough, your parents will not make you homeless when they realize you are still not their son.
It is 3pm. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and thousands of people in your state have died. And you are in your room in your parents' house moping about gender as if your minuscule quandaries have any relevance against the crushing maw of the world today.
You put on randomly selected pants, take two multivitamin gummies, and force yourself to open the door.
ZQ: It's done.
CE: Oh?
ZQ: I built it. I tested it. It works.
Karen sends a video, showing slowed-down footage of a flash of light in the middle of a desert, followed by a cloud growing towards the sky like a tree, and an expanding halo of dust.
ZQ: I call it "Unity", a boring play on Trinity I guess.
ZQ: It's a simple gun-type design. The consorts are surprisingly technologically sophisticated; they already had the means to construct the various components, so it was just a matter of putting it all together.
ZQ: The iguanas all clapped when it worked, though.
CE: Congratulations, I suppose?
ZQ: It's just the first step.
ZQ: Apparently there are at least five iguana states on this world and I've inadvertently made one a superpower.
ZQ: They are asking if we can make more. I'm saying no but they might have the technical skills themselves already.
ZQ: They're already conscripting workers for the uranium mines.
ZQ: So basically you were right.
ZQ: I have a feeling that in order to win my quest I would literally have to create an apocalypse, to "become death" by spreading so much death and destruction that it heralds the Second Coming, or something like that.
ZQ: I hope that won't be necessary, but like, I don't have any evidence either way.
ZQ: Oh no. Now the imps are invading. Can't use nukes to deal with them :( Gotta go.