Chaxium and her formerly human partner Ladyspiller are modern fairies, fighting the good fight against human encroachment, and this time fighting the fairy who goes too far, Chaxium’s ex Clove!  In fey warfare there is only one reliable tool, the living magical machines they can pilot, called ferriers.  Clove’s latest scheme seeks to harness a new breed of them, turn their noble nature to instinctive violence aimed squarely at mankind in this, the fifth Snakewaist novella.  You can find the beginning of the series here.

Snakewaist

Species Invader

by

Blaine Arcade

Underground Networking

Teaching the rules of a board game to a new player is always a taxing process, rewriting their entire world view on a smaller scale, and it becomes infinitely more difficult when new people keep wandering in, staring curiously until they ask to participate, and the unfinished teach must start all over again… and again… and again!?

“So everybody gets two pieces on the board and an understudy in their wings. What, you too? No, sure. We can modify it to accommodate- one, two, three, seven… seventeen players. So, you get two pieces on the board-” Blizzardime the diminutive, the genderless, struggled to explain.

“Is that a-“

“Incredibly fun board game?” they finished. “Yes it is.”

“I was going to say pixie,” the latest fairy to appear at their side corrected. “Sorry, should’ve addressed you. I’m from Rainboa; I don’t think we even have pixies in India.” Though they’d never seen one before the newcomer had guessed correctly, thanks to Blizzardime’s lack of wings and distinguishing family tree features. Their three pixie siblings were around there somewhere as well, usually never out of sight, but the creeping flood of tourists had put up moving walls that isolated them from each other, the realization of which was just now making Blizzardime nervous. There weren’t enough tokens for everybody to play.

“There are pixies in India,” they were able to correct right back, “but you’re not in India. You’re in Onthinice.” Several of the surrounding fairies’ eyes widened. One blurted ‘oh frogshit’ as if they’d just seen a wing-assisted fifteen second skateboarding trick. “Yep, the nation of Onthinice and the principality of Between-the-Cushions-of-the-Spare-Changelings. How did you even get in here?”

Several of them answered at once, in a variety of ways, but most contained the phrase ‘fairy door’. Blizzardime’s head swiveled, couldn’t find anything but more bodies. The only way there could be a fairy door down there was if one of the other Changelings had picked it up during a routine roadside stop, where they often perused overflowing bumbler trashcans for goodies, and for baddies that needed a little elbow grease and a spit shine. If that had happened, whether the finder and keeper was Nickelrime, Quarterfrost, or Snowpenny, they definitely would’ve bragged about it.

“Which way is this door?” Blizzardime asked, shouldering their way through the throngs once most of the pointing fingers were in consensus. Everywhere the pixie looked they saw all their best refuse, detritus, and sun-dried pond flotsam getting trampled by the oblivious who instead had their eyes trained on the seams overhead: those which led out into open Onthinice. That was where the crowds were supposed to stay, up in the badlands where it didn’t even smell a little musty and you couldn’t spy a single shred of cardboard as far as a third eye could see.

Blizzardime didn’t even remember their neck of the bottom of the woods being that big, but at least there was a clear flow to the fairy traffic now; it did stem from a single point. The pixie reached it, grabbed the door frame that appeared so as not to be pushed away by the invading waves. Three more sets of hands grabbed it as well.

“Blizz!” Snowpenny called out. “Did you invite these weirdos!?”

“The only weirdos I know are you guys!”

“Who let them in?” Quarterfrost posed. She made it behind the door, where there was plenty of room, and started pulling her siblings through. As they were freed they saw the door’s solid back, consumed by a design of ivy boughs carved only by the hand of magic. “They didn’t even knock.”

“I’ll try it,” Nickelrime offered, lunging forward to rap on the back of the door, then instantly recoiling. “Nobody’s answering.” Both his index fingers were in his ears as if he’d expected an explosion.

“I don’t think they open both ways,” Snowpenny said.

“It shouldn’t have opened the one,” Blizzardime grumbled. “This many pixies would be a swap meet… this many fairies means they’re going to start a dang music festival any minute now.” A tambourine was hit in the distance. Their eyes widened. “It begins.” Rhythm swelled and was joined by the favorite instruments of layabout nomad fairies: rain sticks, lyres, whistle flutes, and the dreaded quack slapper.

“This definitely feels like it’s going to be a Chaxium and Ladyspiller problem,” Quarterfrost said. “One of us better go warn them before the music does it for us. That way we get the credit.” The Spare Changelings nodded at each other in copious consensus, then again in self-congratulation, before enacting their plan by retreating to a rope ladder they had at the back of the seat seam.

It would’ve been the fastest way to reenter as well, but the two fairies who practically ran Onthinice, when they weren’t outvoted by all the immigrant babysitters that raised the nymphs in their stead, were so alarmed by the news that they descended together before the Spare Changelings could even finish explaining.

It was the bad experience the two of them shared with a fairy door that had them up in arms. Ladyspiller was up in arms anyway, up in her lover Chaxium’s arms, as she no longer had wings of her own and had to be carried through the descent and between the seats of the roaming automobile that housed the family tree.

The last time they’d encountered such a door, unceremoniously built inside their shared ferrier equally uninvited, it had opened to the inhospitable realm of Bottomless Greed, where there be dragons, and where dragons be gross, slimy, and blowtorch-breathed.

Wriggling through the tight squeeze like a centipede of knees and elbows, the two fairies ignored the painful pops of static electricity generated by Chaxium’s wings gliding across the fabric. What they couldn’t ignore was the sight once they were freed. Two concerts’ worth of fairies, from a hundred different family trees, were packed wing to wing.

Chaxium had to maintain composure if only to maintain her altitude, but the low ceiling meant her dangling girlfriend Ladyspiller was wheeling her legs, running across the helpful raised palms of the invaders as if sprinting across a pond. It felt very silly, and no less concerning than moments ago, so she tried to use her time wisely, pointing ahead to where the crowd narrowed.

“I see it,” Chaxium confirmed. “We’ll drop down behind it like the Changelings said.” The music swelled greatly during the brief journey, preventing the two founders from hearing each other. As they passed the door’s frame Ladyspiller stretched one leg and tapped it with a bare foot. Yes, she was able to confirm, just as solid as the last one, rooted like Excalibur. Both fairies caught their breath and examined the branching design.

Only five adults in all of Onthinice were native and bore its physical hallmarks: hair frosted white, a white tuft on the chest, icicle earlobes, and snowflake wings. The couple wore them all well, except Ladyspiller’s wings had been magically altered, not just in size, shape, and composition, but also in what body they were attached to. Now they sat on her ferrier Damseltry, the insect war machine slumbering away in the trunk with most of the other ferriers.

Shouting was worthless; Chaxium used hand signals to indicate she would give Lady a boost so she could stand atop the door and try to crawl in over the traveling heads and access the space beyond. Wherever the enchanted portal led, it couldn’t be that bad if the folk emerging were ready to celebrate and snap pictures of a cushion’s bottom with their showing glasses.

Chaxium nearly overdid it, not entirely accustomed to the additional arm strength she’d developed carrying Lady back and forth across their domain. Lady landed on tiptoe, almost teetered into the crowd, but as soon as she had her balance she flipped around, grabbed the frame, and horizontally threw her body through the door.

The choked crowd was dense enough on the other side to catch her, but they were trying to come through, so they quickly handed her off to the side until there was no one left. Her feet touched down again, on smooth wood thinly encased in a white glow, as if it had been sealed with the light the moon bounces off glaciers.

She looked up. Every last word fell out of her mouth, hadn’t hit the bottom by the time Chaxium squeezed in the same way and found Lady’s side. Her words were lost as well. In all their adventures, more than most fairies as some of the thrill-seekers with missing limbs had told them, they’d never seen such a space. They couldn’t even hazard guesses, as fairy doors were supposed to lead straight from one place to another.

This limited realm appeared transitory, magic’s very idea of a hallway. A mutant octopus of hallways. The root on which they stood, indented deep like the drawers of a card catalog, rose and fell and spiraled and doubled back. It also branched, and as far as they could see two became two hundred.

Each root was surrounded by a casing of empty space; rogue sparkles, ephemeral comets of shine escaping languishing diamond facets, streaked through them and vanished. Beyond that were walls of soil, but not Earth. A new type of stone had been created, pulverized, mixed with the debris of life and death, just to create these fresh boundaries.

If the couple had formed words as quickly as this constricted alternate world had formed they would have asked what substances could possibly make it up. Plants. Rocks. Sure. But something else, infused in the other two. Something energized. Something diverse, proliferating, metallic, harmonized, resonating.

The roots either disappeared around turns or terminated at other fairy doors. Most were open, and most of those had many fairies coming and going, arms hanging over the sides as they struggled with various recording devices. Despite their numbers it was quiet, the roar of Onthinice’s improvised music festival echoing strongest. Everyone had dropped their words.

“None of the doors look the same,” Ladyspiller managed to eventually whisper, but not before they’d both wandered down their root, pushing past the fairies mostly going the opposite direction. She was right; each was carved and set in its own style. Black-winged fairies, wearing their own membranes as veils, emerged like a funerary procession from an equally Gothic portal. Compound eyes came, pair by pair, through a tall door lined with clicking mechanical bug legs.

“They all lead to other family trees,” Chaxium guessed. “It’s… a network of fairy doors connecting the family trees.”

“All of them!?”

“You bet,” a random third fairy blurted as they passed each other. They tapped their showing glass, reminding the couple they could have the best news coverage in the world if they only dug around in their pockets. Having spent too much time with the Spare Changelings, pixies who eschewed anything they couldn’t build themselves out of bumbler litter, the founders had in fact forgotten their showing glasses were at hand.

The devices swiftly connected to Fairnet, the flawless fae version of the internet, in which no intentional lie could flourish. Anything they saw on any number of sites would either be true or clearly labeled speculation.

According to the major fairy news aggregators Windchime, Daily Wonder, Today’s Yesterday, and even the relentlessly skeptical and conservative My Backyard, it was true. All the fairy trees in the world, from Fjordrod in Iceland down to Enigmoss on an island mankind still hadn’t discovered, were now connected via individualized fairy doors and this branching spatial farce of walkway roots.

“This is a new great spell, has to be,” Chaxium muttered as she pecked away at her glass with her thumb, the reality of the answer enveloping her. “But who cast it? And why?” Great spells were greater than great to fairies, and also to the humans who nonetheless failed to be aware of most of them. They were world-changers, labors even ancient demigods could rarely achieve.

Chax and Lady were nearly-cosmic troublemakers, but the closest they’d come to casting a great spell was actually casting a group of trashy and lecherous ghosts out of a fleet of autonomous cars. That didn’t even make an article on My Backyard. The last time a big one had been forced through was the creation of Fairnet itself, and the establishment of Castle Bountybyte with its attending gigagoyles, who safeguarded against the unknown risks of further technological development.

“I bet we can close ours for the time being, if we can get these gawkers to stop pouring through,” Chaxium mulled aloud. “Lady, let’s go back and…” She glanced up; Lady wasn’t at her side. She was further down the root, chasing after something not in sight. Everyone looked too nervous to use their wings around the flitting, streaking, sparkling phantoms out in the open, but that didn’t stop Chaxium, who had nearly lost Lady to her obsession with the last fairy door that opened in their direction.

She launched upward bravely and leveled out, her glide quickly catching up. Delicately she dropped on her, clasping her shoulders, slowing her to a stop. Ladyspiller seemed to regain her senses, started babbling apologies.

“Sorry… I’m sorry… I… I want to go Chax; I want to go see it.”

“See what?”

“Beesnomore.” They stared at each other; Lady’s face started to look squishy, like an ashamed grape, like all the flesh under the surface was liquefying to a bruised wine. Ladyspiller always had trouble letting things go. She mostly despised her old species, yet she still shopped the beastly human internet and spoke like one, constantly defensive. Giving up anything from the fairy phase of her life was more difficult still.

“Do you remember the zombee we had to chase in Parcelbough?” Mentioning Parcelbough was a mistake; that tree was as good as dead too. It had been washed and tossed free of its mooring just one storm season after their visit. There were reports it was still drifting about the coast, alive, but all its fairies had moved on, found another home underground.

“I know,” Lady said. “But Beesnomore is a place. It can’t get away from us. I want to know what it feels like now. It’s… a duty.”

“It’s self-flagellation,” Chaxium argued gruffly, but she didn’t want to scold a partner who already looked like she had whipped her own wings to shreds that couldn’t grow back. “But fine. Let’s get it over with.” She looked around. “How do we even find it in this mess?”

Two alert bubbles formed on their showing glasses, rose and popped in their faces. The answer was once again being constructed in Fairnet. Much of the recording being done was not just for personal scrapbooks, but the sort of collaborative project that was first, second, and third nature to the fairies. A 3D layout of the enchanted tangle was already nearly complete, and dozens of fairies had labeled the tree entrances and exits once they’d confirmed by shaking the hand of or hugging a fairy with all the matching features.

Beesnomore, the abandoned rocky seam in the earth that had once housed the vibrant and busy Beezgalore, was but a stroll away, though that stroll took the sometimes awkward path of a roller coaster collecting injuries. Nobody wanted to visit a dead tree, at least not initially, so the closer they got the more the crowd thinned. Then their path turned down, vertically so. Roots darkened and split into mummified cavities.

Its doorway had no flourish, which was reserved for the living. The frame was black, just curved enough atop to share a silhouette with a headstone. No hinges, no actual door. Naught but a frame open to a rocky alley strewn with leaf and litter. Ladyspiller shook the nerves out of her fingertips and led the way.

The cold hit her first. Onthinice was perpetually climate-controlled through a combination of dashboard air conditioning and magical season-mimicry, spoiling all the nymphs and the adults alike. Now she felt raw, inspected and prodded by an invisible shadow ghoul, something looking for a way in, willing to settle for a nostril or tear duct.

She kicked an empty can of breath pop. In doing so she heard not its rattle, but its crack and fizz, a strong memory from her early days as a fairy, and as one’s girlfriend. Learning fairy foods through touch and taste was such a journey, chaotic and exotic, and that was just typical goods on new taste buds. Food and drink could also be magically enhanced. Breath pop was so enchanted; the instructions stated that after opening it the person the drinker loves most should immediately breathe down the opening.

The bubbles were thus infused with affectionate breath, granting it the flavor of the best kiss the two could possibly share. They’d tried, and tried it so early. Lady had sneezed, once, twice, into an absolute fit at the potency of fairy carbonation. After they were done sneezing and laughing she managed to explain that it was great, that it tasted like dark chocolate and filbert powder.

“Does it?” Chax had asked, her face drifting closer.

What if she found an intact can, down there in the insect tomb? There was no love to breathe into it, so it would just be the flavor of a stranger’s breath, maybe their last. Lady wandered past the drink, right into a scattering of dead and crumpled bees, color faded, hairs blown about like balding broom straw.

“They were probably walking just like we are now,” she said. “Then they got the idea to pick up one of the bees and put that message in it. Then they sent it to us to make sure we felt guilty.”

“Yeah, probably,” was all Chaxium could think to say. It was obvious, as was the futility of whatever they were doing. Getting the guilt out of someone that had, at any point, been human was like wringing all the slime out of a slug. “We’ve got a lot of people to kick out before they start eating all our snacks.” She turned back.

“Wait!” Lady yipped. “This wasn’t here before, was it?” Chaxium sighed and jogged deeper into the stone crevice, to a wall that was no longer rock, nor dirt, for there was a giant circular hole in it. Their eyes couldn’t penetrate its dark. Another yip returned a powerful echo.

“Neither was the groundhog that made it.” Now Lady was the one annoyed, screwing her face up unnaturally, struggling to get the point across with her cute features. “What?”

“Per-fect sir cull,” she over-pronounced, shaping the tunnel before her with arms wide. “A groundhog? One of those fatasses? I don’t think so. This is ferrier-made. And before you say it, none of the ferriers Beezgalore had when those developing bumblers felled it were burrowers.” Chaxium had a decent counter-argument, but Lady was already muttering an incantation-mantra under her breath, making another smaller circle with just her hands. The end result would be luminous magic to light their further descent.

“Yeah, but it could’ve been one of those new ferals, sniffing around for a pilot.” They were the biggest news of the last two years, though this root network was going to blow them out of the chummed waters of gossip for a while. 1,234. That was the very limited edition. There was only one long run of ferrier production, starting in the late nineteenth century, and once the factories, their very shape never revealed outside the circle of engineers, shut down they never reopened.

There had never been more than 1,234 ferriers, and every one was well-cataloged across books and now Fairnet. The number had dwindled in the intervening decades, as sometimes the machines were used as intended, to adventure, to quest, to fight the foes who would only accept a fight, and they could be destroyed as easily as anything else.

Two years ago the estimate was 1,181. Then one had been spotted, the footage blurry, like a cryptid. It didn’t match descriptions of Bigfoot, or of any of the remaining ferriers. Then another, days later. One came too close to a family tree that was ready for it; it was trapped, tamed, and now piloted.

And that fairy was the first to name a ferrier since 1907, as it was nowhere in the records. It was called Couchgrouse, and the pilot opening it for general inspection and recording only compounded the mysteries. The design of its interior was scattershot, as if not planned properly, the controls for some vital functions so far from others that a copilot would be needed to prevent running back and forth in the middle of battle.

Also it bore no strong resemblance to a particular animal, fixture of nature, or folkloric chimera, as all the originals did. Couchgrouse was definitely a bird-mimic, but equal parts grouse, goose, and something so fat it had waddled its way into extinction: the perfect penguin to peruse a beach where tons of assembly furniture washed up.

Only the first of a mysterious, almost exponential, wave of new sloppily-designed and oddball ferriers, Couchgrouse’s tan silhouette, one curious and bold foot outstretched, had become a symbol on websites, pins, and at the center of magical blooming fireworks declaring an intention to strike out from the family tree, to explore and discover a ferrier partner. Whatever they were, they were also a new and unique hope for the generation just coming into their fledgling wings.

The earliest of them had all had bird features, but now they could be anything, including barely recognizable. One good at digging perfectly circular holes was far from out of the question.

Lady finished her spell, the orb of light growing brighter in the cradle of her hands. She held it out to Chaxium, who suppressed a roll of her eyes, rerouted it to her hips, and turned around. When she spread her snowflake wings wide Lady carefully placed the ball against the skin at the membrane’s crux, massaged it flat and then into the veins that fed blood, and now magic, to the diaphanous extremities.

‘Life light’ was the spell’s name, and it was the easiest magical light a fairy could produce, as it fed on their life as a power source, but that meant it had to remain in contact. Spreading it into the wings kept it strong and cast it in all directions while leaving the hands free. Unable to use the tactic herself now, Lady trusted Chaxium to take the lead as she had taken the torch.

Down they went, a steep march, the tunnel floor too compacted to break up or slip. The deceptive precision lulled them into thinking it would be a long journey; its widening into a domed chamber caught them by surprise. So too did the centerpiece of the otherwise empty burrow.

Nestled down was Nestledown, a ferrier that looked familiar to them, but it dodged having a finger put on it, wholly avoided the tip of the tongue, thanks to its last spin cycle in the winds of change. This creature-machine had once been called Deepdove, a short-winged but fast flier, diver, and swimmer. Now its white and blue plating had layered and fluffed into white, tan, and brown.

Its neck and legs were longer, not that they could tell with both fully retracted and lowered, to further trap heat underneath. Its eyes were tinted goggles that hid the occupant piloting from the bridge of the beak, but as soon as Chaxium and Ladyspiller had their feet flat the ferrier’s head lurched forward, drove its bill into the floor like a railroad spike.

The tint and windshield mostly retracted. The fairy they recognized. Waters that had previously half-filled the goggles were now hardly more than a muddy puddle climbing the sides, providing the tint. Mechanical display lily pads taped themselves up the edge, peeled and became fans to send fresh air coursing across the pilot’s skin and hair.

All to primp, caress, and outline the new look of Clove Parcelbough. She too had been through the winds with her steed, but it was unclear if their style had changed together or if she now dressed to accommodate her partner in crimes so large they counted as natural disasters. A big loose collar sat about her shoulders and behind her head, plunged into a V-neck: a ribbon of candy plucked from a taffy puller tree. The rest of her outfit was a skintight pilot’s suit covered in paw prints, bird prints, lizard tail drags…

Her platinum white hair had faded to the yellow of an old pew bible, mishandled by bored children across generations, while her iridescent eyes and white lips remained. The winds had not taken the shape of Parcelbough wings from her: lemon wedges perched on cocktail glasses, trailing herbal tails. The branching mangrove roots of her collarbone complimented her new earthier colors better than her old.

“It’s been two years,” Clove belted out, having oiled and primed the words in her mouth over the last few hours, “yet I still was able to predict you. You haven’t changed. You had the perfect opportunity to do so. Not to worry. Big changes are here, and more on the way. I’m taking care of everything.”

“Is that Deepdove?” Chaxium asked first, trying not to sound angry, but it was expressed anyway when more blood pumped into her wings and intensified the light of Ladyspiller’s spell, made it harsh.

“She’s Nestledown now,” Clove corrected. “I’m not upset with you Chacha, or you Ladybug, for kicking me out of the role of harbinger. I should’ve foreseen it, given you did the same thing with the Wild Hunt. You two are always beheading things, but then you leave the body to wriggle, never taking up the mantle.”

“Did you have something to do with all these fairy doors?” Lady asked, still not recovered from her new pet name of ‘Ladybug’. She had to keep reminding herself that Clove was a fairy, and so couldn’t be a murderer among her own kind, not at this distance. What she projected instead was a kind of homicidal love: affection so smothering it cut you off from the rest of the world.

“Yes!” Nestledown’s wings snapped open in a prideful display, nearly knocking Chaxium down when the breeze caught her wings. Lady was keenly aware of how easy it was to hold her ground. “They’re my latest, but not greatest, invention. Think on it. Now fairies can share ideas face to face, see the toll of what they ignore. Now the dead trees are open to them as graveyards. Now those being clear cut are their next door neighbors. You can even take a cruise on Parcelbough, who is thriving in the currents, as are the fish nibbling on its underbelly.”

“This isn’t really… a problem I guess,” Ladyspiller said, “but you sure made a mess! Why not warn us?” Clove’s face didn’t sharpen, or harden, not exactly; if it was the sun here was her dusk.

“It’s not my job to warn. It’s everyone else’s job to keep up. In the digital world speed is queen.”

“You’re the third Clove I’ve met,” Chaxium snarled, stepping forward, past Lady, so she wouldn’t have to address that her girlfriend was also on her third, or even fourth, hardware generation and software patch. “But all of you have something in common. You only appear when you’re in control of a situation. Every other time you’re gone. How are you in control? This root network is great, as in a great spell. You couldn’t have done it alone.”

“And indeed I didn’t,” the invasive fairy confirmed. “Nestledown was with me all the way, but that’s not what you meant of course. You want to know how a great spell like this, the first since Fairnet, was cast.

It was the same as all the others. A powerful being issues a challenge, and a fairy meets it. I told this being what I wanted, a way to connect all the family trees, and he told me what I had to do: dig a tunnel. Just dig a tunnel, from one family tree to another… but without casting a spell.”

“Who is this being?” Chaxium demanded.

“I won’t say, as I have more to ask of him. Two years I spent, digging this tunnel from one defunct tree to another. Yet all of it was just to test if I could cast a great spell. Next comes the big one.” She winked, shot ice arrows through the couple’s hearts.

“Why are you telling us anything at all?” Lady asked. It was so tiring to be on Parcelbough’s bad side, as cold and isolating as the dark half of the moon. Clove pretended to look hurt.

“Because I still want you to join me! Why should the revolution have two divided fronts? Everyone will believe in our cause more if they see us working together. Besides, I miss the both of you.”

“What is your cause Clove?” Chaxium asked. “Last time it was blowing away a bunch of poor ignorant bumblers for the crime of existing.”

“My cause is to compete in the game they’ve forced us to play,” she answered, voice like a paper cut around their entire silhouettes. “It’s high time for a counteroffensive, and I’ve decided what we need most is more pieces on the board.” Clove reached out with one bare foot, pressed a lily pad like a gas pedal. Nestledown responded by freeing its bill and rising to its full height, which revealed a strange object sat between the stilt legs: ovoid, hammered copper, marred by a single seam halfway between tapered and wide end.

The fairies stared at it, having to swallow dread several times before they could find any words. The pieces of Clove’s scheme fell around them, a jail cell constructing itself with gravity, revealing the utterly dwarfing scale of the endeavor.

“It isn’t just the doors. You’re making all these weird new ferals too,” Chaxium said.

“An egg,” Ladyspiller added, shell-shocked.

“I can’t claim teamwork on this one,” Clove said, reaching behind with both hands and stroking the bird-bot’s brow. “It was all Nestledown… and if it was anyone else it was you! When you knocked us in the winds of change last it gave my ferrier the ability to reproduce. She need only harmonize with another one, touch until their magical wavelengths temporarily align, then she has all the information she needs to internally construct hybrid eggs.

So far the clutches have been anywhere from one to three. They only take one week to incubate, less if Nestledown actually rests on them. Once hatched they are fully independent, eager to explore and live, and they carry with them the now-inherent ability to reproduce in the same fashion.”

“We made them a species,” Ladyspiller said, drenched in disbelief. “Now they’re all wound up and running on their own. Anybody can become a pilot now.”

“We’ll need as many as we can get,” Clove asserted. “I might’ve finished this tunnel seasons ago, but I needed to be topside every once in a while so Nestledown could get frisky and save her kind from extinction by bumbler.” The couple had little in the way of response. As with the doors, they weren’t sure if this was a problem, just that Clove, who had demonstrated she was more than willing to kill innocents if their species was wrong, had significantly expanded her torturer’s toolbox.

“Any more bombs you want to drop on us?” Chaxium asked. Clove breathed through her nose, chest deflating slightly. For the briefest moment fatigue crossed her face, aged her into a crone mummy just unearthed.

“Come with me. Cast the next great spell alongside. Let’s become the fairy trinity, and one day grant great spells to those who follow in our winged contrails.” She extended a hand so far she leaned out of her seat, wings spreading wide.

“We’d need you to take mass human murder off the table before the bargaining could start,” Chaxium said. Clove retracted; they could see in her very posture that doing so would make her next great spell pointless.

“We just want to take care of our family tree,” Lady tried to conciliate.

“Whereas I want to take care of everyone’s,” the jaded tunneler countered, all the dim clod-flinging of the last two years compressed to purple shadows under her eyes. “In that case here is the last bomb I have for you.” On the same wavelength as her ferrier, Clove didn’t need to hit so much as a button to get Nestledown to kick the copper egg forward.

It rolled, forced them to scurry out of the way. Only then did they notice its height was five times their own. It came to a halt. Then it twitched. Fairies flinched. Then it banged. Fairies crouched. Then it scratched. Fairies turned toward the mother, silently begged for an instruction manual, but if one existed it was rolled up in the clutches of the fetal prototype. Seasoned parent to ferriers Clove did have a tip for them though.

“A gift for you, girls. Make sure you take care of it. Oh and you should know, if they see a fairy within an hour of hatching, they imprint. If you want to catch up, just put in the work and come find me.” Nestledown’s goggles snapped shut, mud tinting climbing all the way back up. The burrowing bird turned tail-feather and ran off, vanishing down the rest of the tunnel at the opposite end of the chamber. The egg rocked again.

“Oh shit!”

“Fuck!”

“What do we do!?” Panic set in, along with a swarm of questions. Were newborn ferals hostile? If Ladyspiller, who was already attuned to her ferrier Damseltry, suffered the imprinting, would it interfere with her existing connection? If they just left it there, alone in the dark, would it become traumatized, suffer, be forever emotionally malformed? If it hatched inside the root network could it cause havoc? Destroy what was brand new? The egg’s rumbling made clear only that they didn’t have much time for thinking or planning.

“We’ve got to get it back to Onthinice,” Chaxium suggested. “Everyone there can help us. It can imprint on a volunteer.”

“Right, right, right.” Lady rushed over to the jostling egg, hands already molding some knobby magical dough. “You go back to the car and get some sorcerers.”

“What for?”

“Look at this thing! It won’t fit through any of the doors, so we need them magically enlarged, and I don’t know how to do that! So you go do that. I’ll get it up out of the tunnel.” Chaxium, perpetually brushing her own magical nature off her shoulder in favor of Fairnet and sweaty gym meditation, had no idea how Lady planned to do it, but trust allowed her to depart without further question.

The answer was the spell she kneaded, once it had taken its final shape of a tiny pair of glowing jointed legs, like the bottom half of a marionette pulled by distant cosmic strings. With a push she attached them to the eggshell, where they started kicking the air immediately. Good, she told herself, it worked. Now for a hundred more pairs.

Minutes that felt like hours later, with Lady’s wrists so sore from working magic she felt like her hands might fall off, both fairies converged at the door between the roots and Beesnomore, successful. They embraced briefly, but the egg’s tip was already bumping into the frame, over and over as the two hundred spindly puppet legs on its lower half tried to march its bulk through.

That couldn’t happen until the sorcerers went to work. Onthinice was very young for a family tree, but it never took the most magical fairies in any population very long to buddy up, organize clubs, fan rivalry flames and competition between the others nearest. Chaxium had reappeared with five members of the Hex Hounds: a mostly male club that styled themselves after warlocks in bumbler heavy metal music videos and sometimes had to be chastised for howling at the moon whenever Onthinice rolled one of its windows down.

Aggressive black eye shadow furthered the ferocity on their faces as they positioned themselves about the door and began to tug on imaginary ropes, chanting in forked tongues under panting breath. What was nonexistent started asserting itself, red ropes of magical energy fading into being pre-strained and creaking.

There was no moon, but the Hex Hounds felt they deserved it, so they went ahead and howled to gas each other up, which ultimately might have been for the best, given a sorcerer’s propensity to ramble about whatever spell they were attempting if they had a captive audience. It looked like the only captive was going to be the egg once the door’s frame began to expand. Lady’s little legs pulled it through, but those on the front were left pedaling the air when their cargo capsized against the sides of the root network’s narrow walkway.

“Hounds!” the lone woman among them barked. “Sic’em!” The order must have been akin to ‘fire at will’, for the group broke up into individuals who all chose separate avenues of attack. They freed their magical ropes from the door to Beesnomore, which snapped back to its original size, and reused them to lasso chunks of the walkway, widening it as if it were made of a cooperative dough.

Not to be outdone by their own recruits, founders Ladyspiller and Chaxium caught up and did their best to direct the giant egg, which now rocked so much it was partly selecting its own path. The shell was too slippery to climb, so Chaxium grabbed the daintier Lady, launched, and tossed her atop, where she found her footing, and once more found the ability to control all the footing underneath. When they needed left more than right she was stamping that way with her hundred pairs of feet, and the same went for right.

Chaxium had only her muscle, but it could push as well as it could toss, so she positioned herself behind the egg’s wide bottom and shoved it forward. Sometimes, at a slope, the egg did the work for them, but at every fork it acted like a runaway mine cart, threatened to toss itself into a completely enigmatic abyss.

Worse still, the root network had not depopulated at all in their brief visit to Beesnomore, the opposite in fact. A Hex Hound had to take the lead, snapping and snarling at people to get them out of the way; they all were scared to fly and wound up clinging to the roots like aphids hiding under a gardener’s most prized branches.

The egg-rollers were running out of energy when they finally caught sight of the door back to Onthinice. A second wind passed over them, but also twisted the two halves of the metal egg in different directions. Bismuth steam escaped in jets, then a hooked claw grabbing at nothing, a nothing that was nearly one of the Hounds.

Two of their magical ropes became chains and were cast around the whole egg to keep it together. Chaxium took one and heaved it as tightly as possible, any tighter and the shell would have shorn along with the ripping of her own skin as muscle broke free. The halves of the shell didn’t line up perfectly, and shark fin claws continued to peek and travel across the opening.

“Hustle, hustle, hustle!” Lady ordered all her feet, nearly slipping off the top due to her own sweat, but they were close enough for two of the Hounds to break away and start widening Onthinice’s door. Through it they saw promising signs, including empty space. The musical festivities were under control, moved at least a few inches over or parted like biblical waters. There was much more light as well, which meant the arm rest between the seat cushions had been fully lifted to make way for a hatchling of unknown size.

When Chaxium had gone to recruit the sorcerers she had started the process of getting a volunteer selected for the hatchling to imprint on, and they were waiting eagerly on the other side. Not an adult, but one of the oldest Onthinice nymphs, his caretakers behind him with their hands on his shoulders. The boy didn’t even have unfurled wings yet; his desire for a ferrier must have been incredible for those around to agree to give him priority over any of the volunteer citizens of the tree.

And there was approximately no time left for anyone to question the decision. In the span of thirty seconds the split egg, that split widening all the while, was tremulously waddled through the expanded door, all of Lady’s magical puppet legs shot off in random directions like popcorn, taking the Hex Hounds’ chains with them, and the egg landed at a bad angle, fissure facing away from its prospective pilot. Atop all that, Ladyspiller’s ferrier Damseltry arrived, screech-trilling as it hovered overhead, dark segmented legs twitching anxiously.

“Yes, good girl!” Lady shouted. Like Clove she was on the same magical wavelength as her ferrier, able to communicate with it remotely, though it had not been summoned by her forethought, just her worries over what might happen if a newborn ferrier imprinted on her. The jealous electric blue insect was there to make sure no such thing happened, and did not wait for permission to drop elevation, into the retracted armrest shaft, where it vibrated its wings to generate a precise spinning gust.

It caught the egg’s opening, turned it to face the boy, his cherubic bug-eyed face inflated with painful anticipation. It looked like one tap with a pencil eraser would pop his head. Several of the surrounding imago fairies were struck by dumb bolts of fear over the possibility of the machine’s hostile claws-deployed emergence, all of which were too late to act upon.

Both copper halves were sent rolling, quickly treated as rides by the remnants of the festival crowd. Meanwhile the contents sprung forward and fell flat on its face. At first it looked like the body was strangely pliant, its snout crushed by the fall, the simpler explanation being that its face was just very flat to begin with.

The magical machine rose on two wobbly legs, not unlike those of Nestledown. Chaxium noted that Clove had likely used one laid by her ferrier directly. As always, she kept things personal. What you really had to worry about was that familiarity dropping out from under you. Looking at the newborn allowed her to guess at what mate had helped the bird produce that egg: something modeled on an owl or owl pellet most likely.

Its squat body was shaped like a capsule cut in half, clock-like face on the flat side. Two giant, unblinking, golden eyes met the nymph’s. Stubby wings on its sides were just venting flaps, its plated tail feathers bent to form a drill bit, and its armored hide was coated in chalky knobs of imitation bone, a few decoratively resembling rat skulls.

“It’s a… burrowing owl?” one of the nymph’s guardians guessed.

“Nah, an owl pellet drill baby, awooo!” said a Hex Hound who still hyperventilated despite the ordeal’s completion.

“I don’t think it has to be anything that specific; they’re not engineered like the old ferriers,” Chaxium informed.

“It’s perfect,” yelled the nymph, and this was the only opinion that mattered. It was the hatchling’s whole world, and it trilled in response to the face now branded on its source code. Leaning down, it nuzzled the nymph, who nuzzled it right back. The pair clung to each other; separating them just to send them to bed would be extraordinarily difficult, but that was a problem for the guardians. For now the founders could breathe about one and a half sighs of relief.

“Hey kid,” Chaxium called out to the nymph, who spared her only a fifteen degree tilt of his head to make sure his new companion wasn’t out of sight. “You get to name it now. You’re the first one to name a ferrier in Onthinice history! So, who’s your friend?”

“Bomburrow!” Bomburrow it was, added to the car’s stable of ferriers alongside Snakewaist, Damseltry, Loftalon, Mudguppy, Fatback, and Geodin. So many names, all of which struck Chaxium right then, deafening her to the surrounding celebrations. This was how Clove was going to do it, by scaling up what had eventually derailed their romance. She would amaze with gifts that changed the course of your life if you accepted them, and then behind closed doors she would do something without you, in your united name, until you didn’t recognize your surroundings anymore.

They’d already entered the naming phase, where the amazing gifts had to be swiftly integrated if everyone was to keep up with Parcelbough. The first of the ferriers she hatched, the first one found anyway, was Couchgrouse. Soon all the pilots who connected with this new generation of ferriers would call them and themselves couchgrousers, wear its tan silhouette as a pin. Naturally occurring and bred ferriers would be called second generation.

Then there was the great spell too, its name already passed around online, through the chaotic drafting phase: the family roots. The world’s fairies could now connect in person, with completely free movement, and Clove Parcelbough could drop in for dinner whenever she pleased.

Lord of the Castle

Sleep they made time for, but found it fitful, as everyone coming through the doors hadn’t gotten it through their skulls yet that other trees still existed in their respective time zones. The other founders, utilizing their ferriers to direct traffic, were kind enough to take the reins from Chaxium and Ladyspiller while they, at best, tossed and turned.

Instead of dreams Chaxium only had everything Clove had said to contemplate. Awkwardly shaped sentences tumbled and clunked like bumbling lock picks, until they happened to fall into place, silent conclusions disturbing the Onthinice fairy all the more. Ladyspiller still didn’t know Clove like she did. All her requests were genuine, and she never had to debase herself by pulling out a datebook and making plans. If you wanted to meet her, all the information you needed was in what she had already told you, and you had no excuse in not uncovering it, because no conversation with her was casual or throwaway.

Parcelbough had asked them to catch up. That meant they could. Were they going to try to stop her? The purpose of her second great spell was unclear, but Chaxium was sure it was malicious, now that she had the rest of her species snowed with the benevolent one she’d just cast.

When Ladyspiller half-woke from her half-sleep she found her partner sitting outside the open window of their apartment, on a leaf of the tree, dense foliage only parting and granting a view of the car below when they wanted it to. Chaxium’s state of mind had opened a seam in the green, just enough to glance down and make sure everything wasn’t collapsing under them.

“Are we going after her?” Lady asked instead of saying good morning; she didn’t know what time it was. Ruby Slipper, their pet trilobite beetle, crawled across the ceiling, but that was routine without a routine.

“We stopped her last time,” Chaxium answered.

“Does she ever stop?”

“I don’t think this new one does.”

“Clove is something else,” Lady said, slightly chilled, “but I don’t want her to be our… I guess career path? This car’s on our career path.”

“This car goes in circles. Big ones, all over the country, and it’s fun to see these places, but we’re on the road because we’re scared of what could happen to us if we let the engine die and the body rust in a grove.”

“If she casts another great spell,” Ladyspiller said, nudging onto a slightly askew path, “that’s probably the last one, right? They don’t let just anybody cast them, like how she said she had to pass a trial, dig that tunnel. Even if she succeeds in the next trial, whoever supplies all this magic will get tired of her shopping list at some point, won’t they?”

“I was thinking about that,” Chaxium said, holding up and shaking her showing glass, indicating that the thinking had taken her on a journey of messaging back and forth. As soon as it disappeared back into her lap a bubble drifted out, floated over to Lady’s glass on their tortoise-beetle-finished night stand. Once it popped on her screen Lady picked it up and scrolled through, but Chaxium explained what she was looking at anyway.

“There aren’t many entities remaining that can cast great spells. Clove wants us to help her, but if she just told us everything we wouldn’t have to go through what she went through to catch up. She wants us to do the same labor: physically, emotionally, and intellectually.”

“You think this entity is in Fairnet?” Lady asked, responding more to what she saw on the screen: a picture of a tiered towering castle on a thin sharp mountain, white stone almost as peculiar as the alien trees beneath.

“Clove gave us clues before she kicked Bomburrow at us, so we could figure it out like she did. She said ‘in the digital world’ speed was key, but I don’t think she was talking about the current technological age. Then she mentioned her roots spell was the first great one cast since Fairnet. Put those together… and it suggests the entity casting them for her lives in Fairnet.”

Lady finally scrolled far enough to get to her girlfriends’ exchange with Gigafive, their resident expert on the fairy internet, considering he was entirely constructed of its code. His nose belonged in every building he might’ve ever perched on, if you asked him, so looking at the message history might have prompted a visit, he could emerge as an illusion from any device, but they had a longstanding agreement he was not to bother them in the bedroom.

Inbox:

(OLD)(Chaxium): Important question Gigafive. Does anything that could cast great spells live in Fairnet?

(OLD)(Gigafive): ‘Live’ is a term he might object to, just as I do, but yes. If you’re asking you must think that Clove creature has bargained with him. What do you plan to do? I swear I just had the car as clean as I wanted it only for those hooligans to come traipsing in.

(OLD) (Chaxium): Five, only when you stop complaining about the pixies living between our seats, where you can’t even see them, will I believe you’re satisfied with our cleanliness. WHO IS ‘HE’?

(OLD) (Gigafive): Gigamillion

(OLD) (Chaxium): …He’s one of you??

(OLD) (Gigafive): Of course. We were the only lifeforms constructed to survive in magidigital space. There are nasty things on the bumbler side, but the barrier is quite impenetrable.

(OLD) (Chaxium): There must be a way to contact him then. Clove did it.

(OLD) (Gigafive): No I’m afraid not. He’s certainly capable of opening a line of communication with any Fairnet terminal, but he would never. We don’t want to invite activity; it could very easily lead to more of us getting activated, and I’ve told you what terrible company we are to each other, especially with those who outrank us.

(OLD) (Chaxium): GIGAFIVE. Clove has done this. It’s fact. Assume that and tell me how she did it.

(NEW) (Gigafive): Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… Since he’s not receiving mail, I suppose she could have sent herself to him instead of an E-letter. Unlike Bottomless Greed and Magic, organic beings cannot survive in digital spaces, but as with outer space or the ocean, you could encase yourself in a vehicle, maintaining a bubble of your reality on the inside.

Ferriers could serve this purpose, now that they’re integrated with Fairnet. Their nervous system nodes could link in a skin, fully encapsulating the pilots. Then all she would need is a portal, but I don’t know where she would’ve gotten one of those. You’re not thinking of going there are you?

Chaxium? Chaxium???? I forbid you to speak with him! If he’s cross with me I’m going to wind up splattered on the windshield like a grassh…

“What do you think?” Chaxium asked when Ladyspiller was silent ten seconds too long after lowering the glass.

“I think we have a duty to at least figure out what her great spell is before she casts it. She’s involved us, given us clues. Like it or not, nobody is in a better position to monitor her… and step in and on her toes if she gets all… bumblercidal.” Chaxium threw herself back through the window, onto the bed on all fours. A thrill danced in her cheeks and down her tympanic throat.

“This will be Damseltry’s first real adventure. Are you excited?” Lady sank into herself.

“I’m always scared when I should be excited and excited when I should be scared. I can’t listen to either of those feelings. But… we’re not trying to take her into Fairnet are we? I mean, does it have air? Can she fly without air?” A bubble blew itself off Chaxium’s showing glass, too big to be polite, and popped between their faces. Both looked down at the new message.

(NEW) (Gigafive): For the medium of magidigital space an aquatic form would be best for navigation.

“You’re not supposed to be listening in here either Gigafive,” Chaxium scolded him. No second bubble appeared, so he had wised up enough to at least not acknowledge his eavesdropping.

“An aquatic form,” Ladyspiller read again. “The most aquatic one we’ve got is Fogfish. Do you think Blizzardime is up for it?” Chaxium’s answer was apparent, as she was already heading to their walk-in closet to ferret out her best adventuring outfit, all her pondering pointless, as Lady already knew what she would inevitably choose: kiwi fur jacket, gold leaf tipped boots, and those high-waisted pants with a mud pattern sloshing up to her knees, some of it real and caked on.

Of course Ladyspiller had to match her girlfriend’s dedication with her own adventuring ensemble, a deft pairing of a sharp-shoulder jacket to disguise her lack of wings and a giant central zipper, taken from the pocket of a bumbler fanny pack to acknowledge her heritage and historic uncoolness.

Only once properly attired did they journey down between the seats to pitch the mission to Blizzardime. The pair thought it might be a hard sell, they wanted to risk as few lives as possible despite never seeing the pixie without their three siblings, but were shocked to hear their small friend agree almost instantly.

The pixie vanished, as only a pixie can, by wriggling into a crack you hadn’t noticed until then like a skink, and returned several minutes later wearing what looked like a chest full of military medals and commendations if they were made out of soda tabs, Velcro fuzz, and candy tablet-derived finger paints.

“Do… do we need to ask the other changelings for their blessing?” Lady asked, still in the dark about the exact family dynamic buried between her kingdom’s cushions.

“No, I want it to be a surprise,” Blizzardime responded plainly. “They’ll never believe I did this. Then they’ll be mad they didn’t get to do it, and I will have that forever.” The couple glanced at each other without saying anything. Never look a gift ferrier in the mouth, or you might find a radical pilot.

Next came logistics. Gigafive was actually summoned before he offered his expertise this time. It took a good deal of coaxing in fact. He was adamant they not go through with the mission, as it was his loftiest ambition to never exist in the peripheral vision of his likely lord Gigamillion.

“If we go to him it means we didn’t do our jobs,” the gigagoyle had said. “When he finds out I sent you he might confine me to the castle, or sit on me for all time.”

“He’d have to catch you first,” Chaxium had assured their jittery old friend who was always as confident as a cat suspended over a bath on a dental floss tightrope. “Powerful as he is, he doesn’t leave the area around Castle Bountybyte, right? He’s not coming all the way out to our runaway truck ramp of a computer system.”

“Where did you even hear these things anyway?” Lady had further challenged. “You weren’t alive until you showed up to calm Snakewaist, and you only went back to the castle that one time with the Wild Hunt.”

“I read it scratched on a wall of the castle interior,” the creature claimed, biting on nails he could make grow back instantaneously. “Straight from the claw of Gigatwo: do not trifle with Gigamillion.” The founding fairies promised not to trifle, to not even eat a trifle at any point during the mission, even though they could be considered one of the thirty-seven fairy food groups.

Blizzardime had to get in some bullying as well, their thousand-yard stare quite useful for further unnerving the gigagoyle; when he relented they all collaborated on preparations. What coding had to be done was handled by Five, and would theoretically cause Fogfish no distress, especially since it was already versatile in terrain, swimming capably through both water and fog.

Communication with gigagoyles lesser than Million but greater than Five might be necessary to point the way, and that could be difficult from a ferrier that, Five assured them, would be larger than the highest towers where most of his kind were perched; so they rigged a secondary submersible, so primitive an idea that it would be little more than a marble powered by their own shifting inside.

Snakewaist was capable of launching an ovoid escape pod from a thankfully-disguised hatch beneath the tail, and it too could maintain a magical seal. After extracting it, magically-woven copper rope was used to attach it to Fogfish, dangling slightly beneath the ferrier’s chin like a barrel of brandy on a St. Bernard’s collar. If necessary they could release the pod to the castle’s parapets and speak to their guides through the portholes.

With their craft honed, that left the matter of departure. How were they supposed to squeeze a ferrier into Fairnet in the first place? Clove had achieved it, but not been forthcoming. Unfortunately for the couple’s mood, the provocateur had provided the answer anyway. Escaping her was like trying to surface in a covered pool.

The Family Roots. Other trees had their own mission, naturally self-imposed, and already complete too. Clove’s great spell was fully mapped, the resource freely available on their destination: Fairnet. Every door was labeled, and upon close examination Gigafive found that not every one led to a family tree. A few had as their destination magical locations associated with fairies, or other derived creatures like leprechauns and pixies: defunct stumps, ritual circles of stone and fungus, Squall Tormenta, the first grove-

“And Fairnet,” Five finished listing. “That’s your way in, if you insist on dooming me, your best friend in every world. The doors can be stretched to sufficient size with the same technique used for Bomburrow’s egg. Just post those howling ninnywizards at the door to let you back out when you’re done.”

From there it was a flurry of preparations, quick meetings, progress checks, and stocking up on supplies for repair or emergency. Before they knew it they were in Fogfish’s cockpit with Blizzardime at the controls: a slab of scales, each with a digital display dew drop doming them. Together the trio slowly drifted over the family roots, equidistant from the perpetually crowded paths and the strange curved ceiling of the irrationally-numbered dimensional space.

Only when they checked their bottom-view camera feeds did they see everyone looking up, waving them on, perhaps wondering if this was to become a ferrier highway as well. That’s when the mutual absurdity and profundity of what they attempted finally struck the couple, right in the heads, in the mouths, gulped down as an ice ball of fear.

They looked at each other across Blizzardime’s focused face; this wasn’t the changeling’s idea, so they didn’t have to worry about any of the consequences. All they had to do was fly the fish.

“Except for Clove we’re probably the first fairies to ever do this,” Ladyspiller said when they were approaching the Fairnet door, already chained and stretched in multiple directions like a tent flap held open by a tarantula.

“I’m definitely the first pixie,” Blizzardime bubbled, mentally awarding themselves a tinfoil medal, a rehearsal for the actual ceremony later. Ladyspiller didn’t feel like correcting them, partly because she wasn’t sure there was anything to correct. Without her wings she might count as a pixie, but her continued ability to generate and channel magic countered that. She was just a weirdo… but weirdos in their shrunken world were afforded the same place as everyone else. That’s what she was defending, what would be threatened if Clove got her all-out war with bumblerkind.

“We’re taking fire,” Blizzardime said too nonchalantly, which startled their passengers more than the content of the statement, still enough to make them search every corner of Fogfish’s cockpit glass.

“Those are fireworks Blizz,” Lady sighed with relief when she identified harmless bursts of colorful magic shot out of finger guns brandished by the fairies below. “They’re sending us off.”

“Weird, ‘cuz that’s what I’m doing,” the changeling commented, pushing forward on the tail fin-shaped flight sticks. The ferrier surged forward, churning up fog behind it; all at once they were flung through the opening into Fairnet. Bracing themselves for some fundamental shift, at least static nesting in their hair, they had to unclench everything they had when it was clear nothing felt any different.

Ladyspiller was about to say something about that actually making sense, about nobody feeling wet in a submarine, when they instead saw how terribly different the digital world was from their native one.

It had a designed nature, that was never in doubt, but it didn’t look the part. Fogfish hung in the air over a forest with a strangely smooth canopy, treetops dogpiling each other into the distance. The daylight was perpetually full, which meant it wasn’t a day at all, more of a light trap, the same rays gliding endlessly around the curved boundaries of the world. Clusters of them could be seen in far-off sky like shooting star geysers, progress across the shell slow but clear.

That initially drew their attention from the light show below, where a rainbow of data packet dots hopped instantaneously between leaf shadows: the firing of magidigital nerves. Every time they sent a message on their showing glasses, or projected webcam footage of their cheerleaders at the bottom of their ferriers’ windscreens, a blast of these was sent out. So numerous were these guided missile LED fireflies that their activity was more like a pulsing quilt glimpsed between the bare patches of the forest, which they just now saw the slightly aberrant colors of: neon green foliage and taffy-teal trunks.

Both of these sights paled in comparison to the wall, just to Fogfish’s left. The more they looked the more disturbing detail they saw, the more they had to change the descriptor. Wall became barrier. Became membrane. Became clarified chicken skin. Brown when it wasn’t purple, stretch-marked where it wasn’t blistered, the membranous barrier wall of chicken skin was just clarified enough to know giant things lurked beneath it.

“What part of Fairnet is that?” Lady asked in absolute disgust, so concentrated on her tongue that she tasted vomit. Looking away proved difficult, as the abomination stretched as far as everything else, a colossal divider splitting the realm in half.

“No part,” Chaxium explained, frowning deeply, glad that Fogfish’s seal prevented any kind of odor infiltration. “It’s the human internet on the other side of that. Fairnet shares digital space with it because it’s partly compatible; that way information and content can pass through, sort of like stuff passing through cell walls. But since Fairnet can’t contain lies, all of those get caught in the filter. That’s what we’re looking at: a manifestation of bots, scams, propaganda, cyberbullying, machine-generated articles, manifestos of soon-to-be lone gunmen…”

Both the seal between the halves of the digital world and that separating Fogfish from its atmosphere were supposed to be impenetrable, but it seemed like one of the things lurking on the bumbler side sensed their presence. A bulge appeared across from them, stretched more and more of the wall in their direction. Blizzardime had the sense to make Fogfish swim away, which quickly caused the thing to lose interest and flatten out again.

“And to think I used to spend all my time there,” Ladyspiller said, glossing over how she still spent six hours a week in those parts. Perhaps less in the future. The near future.

It didn’t take long to find Castle Bountybyte: the only structure that rose above the bustling electric forest aside from its upward curve in the distance. Stood magnificently, almost defiantly, tall on a sheer pinch of bedrock code, it was a spire of whitest smoothest stone with several parapets. The closer they got the more it looked like its ridges had gooseflesh, which the couple correctly guessed were the kindred of Gigafive, eternally asleep until activated and tasked with solving whatever problems had arisen in the magical internet. Blizzardime, accustomed to checking under rocks when looking for places to camp, instead examined the base of the towering fortress, saw something of note.

“I’ve got movement down there, around the back,” they said, already having the fish ferrier arc wide around for a better look. Chaxium and Ladyspiller leaned to take a look; the movement belonged to a fleshy white arrowhead. It was the tip of a tail, the arrowhead a very common shape for terminating the body of a magical creature. Unfortunately it rarely meant an adorable face covered in furry fletching.

“He’s huge; that’s got to be Gigamillion,” Chaxium said as their vehicle swung low and idled in its own fog near the base of the castle. It was too open to be called a chamber, the rest of the building supported by the cliff in the back and but two thin columns on the other side. Underneath was a shallow basin, perfect for a giant cat to curl up and sleep in, or something that prowled and fell like a cat.

“Is he asleep?” The pinions of one of the monster’s bat wings were drawn over his face. The chest rose and fell slowly, so he was not an inert statue like most of the smaller ones. As flawlessly white as the castle shading him, Gigamillion was more than Gigafive times 200,000. Even curled up they could see he had a greater concentration of proportionally larger and curlier horns, withe the same sort of spines thrown in for good measure. The talons on his gnarly mitts were less for snatching fish out of a lake and more for excavating a quarry.

“We want to talk to him, right?” Blizzardime asked.

“Yeah, but if h-“

“Initiating alarm bubble!” The pixie pulled something red out of a gill slit on their console, which snapped back like a cartoon shutter. Fogfish funneled its lips into a bubble gun, blowing and launching a wobbly rainbow glob at a speed faster than any non-enchanted bubble could survive. A moment later it popped wetly against the dozing beast’s flank, not with a gentle kiss but the startled honk of an aircraft carrier-sized loon.

“You should really wait for us to tell you what to do!” Lady scolded, practically poking holes in her cheeks with frightened fingertips as their target began to unfurl.

“Why? It’s my ferrier. I’m the captain.” It was too late to regret picking one of the younger Spare Changelings as their pilot, and too late to argue that those with the most adventuring experience should’ve been the ranking officers. All three of them were easily outranked by Gigamillion, by his left claw now slapping and grabbing the edge of the basin, by his right doing the same.

He held his heavy head low, tusks big enough to be castles of their own should they be hollowed out. Down the center of his face were carved numbers, unevenly applied by his own hand: 1 0 0 0 0 0 0. Blank eyes nonetheless had numerous expressions massaged into them by his brow protuberances. A nasal inhale put the fear of fire-breathing in the fae. Luckily it was just for words, which were delivered in a voice much less threatening than anticipated, belonging in a smoking jacket and pondering a newspaper, with ignored children scampering about nearby.

“Another one? I was worried I might become popular.” His tone was less suggestive of worry than hope.

“Can you put us on speaker, captain?” Chaxium asked.

“You got it cadet.” A popped bubble among a nest of identical others inside a console screen made Fogfish open its mouth and gills wide. An illusory image of a microphone sleeve was cast over all the dew domes.

“Hello,” Chaxium greeted calmly, not timidly. “Are you Gigamillion?”

“The one, and only only only, only only only,” he answered with a musclebound gargoyle’s version of a smirk. “To whom am I speaking? And how many are you?”

“I am Chaxium Onthinice, here with my partner Ladyspiller and one other.”

“Captain Blizzardime.”

“Only three?” Gigamillion sighed. He was the size of a cruise ship to them, so he’d expected at least as many people as tended to wait and wave at the port when one was docking. “That is three times as many I suppose… could be exponential.”

“The one,” Chaxium interrupted, “was Clove Parcelbough, yes?”

“That was her name. I assume she’s told you about our successful collaboration.”

“You mean the great spell you cast? The Family Roots?”

“Casting isn’t a good word,” the beast said, sounding ready for a lecture. “Great spells are two-part constructions: setting the stage and the performance. Setting is what takes the resources, but there’s plenty of time for design. The performance is where all the risk is. If your opening show reviews poorly, it will close and never run again. If you’re a hit it could run upon that stage forever.”

“What made you decide to set the stage?” Chaxium asked, careful not to burst the clear pride on display. “You never have before.”

“Nobody ever asked! Intimidated by my reputation, I assume. Besides, I do live the reclusive life out here. The strands of the fairy social web run crisscross over every inch of my domain, but I do not read them, ever, as that would be a violation of privacy.”

“I see. We’ve come for your expertise on this most recent great spell, which has proven impressive thus far. Everyone’s enjoying it.” Gigamillion preened, sat up so tall that he struck his head on the bottom of Bountybyte. His wince was quickly hidden, but not the gouges his horns left behind.

“Wonderful to hear, wonderful, although I do permit myself the occasional glance at message boards. Those are intended to be public after all. I am nothing but John Q. Gigagoyle as my shadow passes over them. Thus I have picked up the distant applause. You’re all very welcome.”

“Yes, thank you,” Lady said in a false gush, so aware that Chaxium was gritting her teeth that she could feel her own jaw tense.

“We’re really here to learn about the encore,” Chaxium said.

“No, no no, not the encore. The roots were the opening act. If Clove can master her stage directions, what’s next is the main event. I warned her, the greater the spell the greater the challenge, but that girl shies away from nothing!” Chaxium held her tongue, did not share the sore fact that if you tried to shy away from Clove, hide in a dark hole, you would turn toward the center of the Earth and see she’d beaten you there and made herself comfortable in your bedding, with luminous eyes staring back, never closing. That fairy gave no quarter to her fellows’ weaknesses, never let you drop your guard of perfection and just be a bedgrub or a worklouse.

“What happens in the main event?” Gigamillion pursed his lips, a gust of inward breath still audibly occurring as his tusks prevented a perfect seal as well as a decent one.

“A species invasion!” His shoulders wiggled like a cat ready to pounce.

“We don’t know what that is,” the captain said too bluntly, putting the giant creature off his enthusiasm. It recovered before his next word.

“You wouldn’t would you,” he reminded himself, “given that I’ve only recently invented the concept, commissioned as I was by young Ms. Parcelbough. I’m sure you’ve heard of an invasive species.” They answered yes, the bumbler and fairy definitions provided in school matching up.

An invasive species was an organism transplanted to a new environment which then proliferated and did harm to native species, possibly to the point of extinction. Snakeheads in lakes and rivers. Vines eating the South. Giant toads popping on Australian roads. The crew of Fogfish knew many of the tales.

“A problem made a thousand times worse by bumblers, since they love doing the transplanting so much,” Gigamillion elaborated. “So I thought they should have a taste of their own medicine. It came to me when Clove showed me her unusual ferrier Nestledown, which had developed the ability to lay eggs!” Fogfish collectively, and silently, decided not to tell him that was partly their doing.

“Most ferriers,” he reminded them, “had to be brought in and upgraded to operate with Fairnet in the nineties. The only ones that weren’t were the destroyed, the lost, and the indomitably feral. The ones inside Nestledown’s eggs, this truest second generation, are not my new system woven into their old.

This time they are the same system. All ferriers bred this way are compatible with Fairnet in every fiber-optic of their being! That gives me a good deal of expertise and influence that I’d never had in the machines before.

So, should Clove succeed, I will be existentially authorized by Bottomless Magic to push the most magical software update in the history of the world! It will officially make ferriers an invasive species, only they will be invading civilization instead of nature. Ferriers will break into homes and chase out the owners. They will worm their way into public works and riddle them with holes. Cities, towns, and even space stations will become overrun with them as they outbreed bumbler innovations in their destruction. That is the main event!”

Fogfish’s mouth hung open, and not just because it was a fish. Blizzardime’s hand was paralyzed on the gill flap lever, giving his ferrier the same slack-jawed expression he and his copilots wore.

That was her angle: Clove’s war. It was a war that would fight itself on autopilot. A war that no fairy needed to get involved in if they chose to cower. Clove would invent it, deploy it, direct it the way one would tie the branches of a bonsai tree with wire. She would save everyone, and act like she expected nothing in return, because no one ever could keep up with her.

“That’s… not great for ferriers, right?” Blizzardime asked, having just enough presence of mind to cut off the radio for a moment. Gigamillion was plenty pleased with himself based on the ferrier’s face alone.

“Countless of them will be destroyed,” Ladyspiller said, aghast but quiet, a phantom staring at her own slain body. “We can’t let that happen.” She turned to Chaxium. “How can Clove let that happen? She created them, and she’s going to let them smash themselves against a brick wall?”

“Do that long enough and the wall comes down,” Chaxium clinically delineated. “Fighting is what they’re born to do, because they come into a world where their enemies have already won.” There were hours of discussion to be had, dimensions to realize, consequences to quantify, but they didn’t have those hours. Clove’s clock was already counting down, and Gigamillion was starting to find their silence curious.

“What do you think?” the giant gigagoyle probed. “A stroke of artistic genius, isn’t it? It’s good for Fairnet as well. Once the bumbler infrastructure goes down all their digital pollution will go dark, and this side of the land can become all of it. No more of an entire cardinal direction being an eyesore.”

“Gigamillion,” Chaxium addressed him after getting nods from her crewmates, “what if someone else completes the challenge that you set before Clove does?” He was sitting still, yet somehow gained the posture of a runner stopped dead in his tracks. One long alabaster claw gouged at some digital soil just beyond Bountybyte’s flawless white.

“The terms are already laid out,” he said. His finger played with the gouge, going back and forth, never widening it. Three little stabs marked dark options. Once he saw them he was able to speak them. “Failure means nothing changes, and the same party can’t make another attempt. Success allows for a few demands within the rules.

Someone who succeeds could make second generation ferriers an invasive species. They could also change nothing and formally close the challenge so that no one else could attempt it. And lastly, they could enforce the complete opposite, make it so that these ferriers cannot ever become invasive.

I don’t know why anybody would want that… but I must be impartial! All the best casters of great spells are. I will do my duty and accept whatever result, without interfering with anyone who would attempt it. It’s,” he struggled to match it to his earlier metaphors, “an open casting call.”

“We’re going to go for it too,” Ladyspiller said, to firmly get it out there, to make it harder to take back. Chaxium only encouraged her, glaring with dark intensity. She spoke so harshly of Clove’s determination, but her own could be fearsome once ignited, a coal seam acridly smoldering for decades. “Gigamillion, will you please share the challenge with us?”

“Oh good show!” he boomed, tusked mouth dropping open into an orangutan’s amused funnel. He clapped his hands better than any ape, man included. “Better to show you. Come with me.” The fairies didn’t have time to obey his order, as he lunged forward and wrapped his arm around Fogfish, carting it up the mountain beside Bountybyte until they were perched atop it and staring out at the lights of the data forest, like moss throwing a rave.

Jostled more than just physically, Chaxium and Ladyspiller had to remember this was the gigagoyle’s world, so of course his body was real there. Gigafive was never more solid than a sneeze back on Earth. Million mesmerized them again by casting out his talon, and an illusion along with it, something that painted over the terrain with white and gray.

“Behold,” he said of the expanse that gained driving winds, bluffs of snow, and a dull glow of sun choked out by ten textures of ice. “Antarctica! The most inhospitable continent on the planet. There, anywhere there really, as long as it’s a bit inland, the challenge can be completed.

Whosoever should journey there and construct a ferrier nest populated by at least fifty second-generations shall irrevocably alter the nature of the machine. Almost every group of ubiquitous animal, rodents, beetles, frogs, has a foothold on multiple continents, but no presence at all in Antarctica.

So that makes it the ultimate challenge! If a species can invade there, it can invade anywhere. From out of their nest will radiate my new great spell, giving every ferrier the aggressive instinct to invade human spaces, raid their infrastructure for nesting materials, and fight off any that try to stop them. If they so much a-“

“Or not,” Blizzardime interjected.

“Pardon?” The illusory wind died down with his enthusiasm, making it look much more a drab desert.

“Or we can say ferriers will never do that, if we build the nest first.”

“Yes, true, true. But Ms. Parcelbough is already on her way I’m sure. It will be difficult for you to catch up. If you want my opinion,” the fierce snow picked up again, “an invasion would be much grander! Without one people might not even know a great spell was cast at all… they’d have to look it up in the library.”

“Libraries are cool,” Ladyspiller squeaked.

“Yes, of course, vital public service,” Gigamillion practically coughed. “Not to worry fairies, you shall face no resistance or subterfuge from me, regardless of what you intend to do with your victory, should you have it that is. I’m honor-bound to not interfere once I’ve issued the challenge.” Fogfish fell into silence, with the giant gigagoyle assuming they were marveling at the grandeur of Antarctica, or his artistic interpretation of it at least, but in truth they had cut off their microphones to discuss the technical side of what came next.

“How are we going to wrangle fifty feral ferriers, get them to the cold ass of the world, and get them to build a nest there?” Ladyspiller asked, tapping at an arm of her glasses the way a woodpecker would a plastic tree.

“They don’t have to be feral,” Chaxium pointed out, “there are couchgrousers that have already tamed some. We could ask them.”

“Fifty’s too many,” Blizzardime said, each word a correct clear cut, said solemnly though the changeling would certainly consider their own contribution finished long before the couple set sail or took to the wing, whatever eldritch abomination was supposed to convey them to Antarctica.

“Blizz is right,” Lady said, “it would take days just to contact fifty different couchgrousers who would also be close enough to join us, not to mention convincing each and every one that it’s the right thing to do. So the only possibility is something more direct, something that can influence fifty ferals.”

Fogfish had multiple cameras on its exterior, facing every angle. Chaxium shifted over to the chain of bubbles hanging from one of the artificial tear ducts, each of which showed a video feed. Gigamillion was completely mistaken, as it was the view opposite the icy wasteland that filled her with ideas. Those notions were perched atop parapets, gutters, and rails, in smooth but sharp alabaster, all over the exterior of Castle Bountybyte.

“The gigagoyles,” she said, grabbing the chain by its relevant bubble and blowing into it, which made it expand enough for all of them to see. “They’re asleep until they’re needed for a digital task, and all you have to do to wake them up is yank on their tails.”

“Right,” Lady said, recalling Gigafive’s story of his visit. “Then they’re desperate for purpose. If we tell them to do something they’ll throw themselves into it full tilt.”

“What do you want them to do?” the spare changeling asked.

“Pilot the ferals,” Chaxium explained. “Gigafive can do it in place of a pilot, and since the gigagoyles can just enter their software there won’t be much resistance, and if there is they can hop to the next nearest one in a flash.”

“Faster than my old wifi,” Ladyspiller added with a nod. “But is Gigamillion going to be cool with us tugging fifty tails? Isn’t he stuck living with them when it’s all said and done?”

“Whether or not he is, we have to ask,” Chaxium grumbled. “It’s not like we can just sneak by him and do it; he lives in the basement. He’s head honcho, so he might even sense it every time one wakes up. Let’s just… be polite.”

“Right, so how many times do I say please?” Blizzardime asked, already reaching for the microphones. Chaxium’s hand swooped in and took over.

“Let Lady do it, if you don’t mind Captain.”

“Well, it is ladies and women and children first,” they noted, expending the entirety of their nautical knowledge. Lady was allowed to slide into place, where she then took three staccato breaths in preparation. Klik.

“Gigamillion, might we ask you about something? It’s probably the only way we can make your challenge into a real contest.”

“Oh? By all means. Keep in mind I can’t fly you there myself, ha ha no… It would be wonderful to visit though.” He sighed at his own painting.

“All you would have to do is not interfere, which you’ve already been doing excellently, heh. Anyways… we’d like to wake up some of the other gigagoyles, just enough to pilot the fifty ferriers we’ll need.”

“Forty-nine,” Chaxium corrected.

“Right, only forty-nine, because we’re already friends with one.”

“Maybe forty-four.”

“Yes, forty-four. There are a few just hanging around right? Gigasix through Gigaten? I’m sure they’re not busy.” Fogfish shook as Million repositioned it in front of his face, like a hoagie he was about to swallow in two bites. Despite the absence of color, clear suspicious hatred flashed in his eyes.

“How did you know those ones were awake?”

“We just… heard about it from the one we know.”

“The only one who would know would be the traitor who woke them without consulting me. Gigafive. Is he your associate?”

“More like our driver; it’s a formal relationship,” she said thinly.

“Don’t you know what happens when we’re roused from our slumber?” the hopefully-not-piscivorous beast asked. “The number goes up by one each time, and the higher it is the more powerful the gigagoyle, so that we might match whatever innovative horrors come to threaten Fairnet.

I am the sole number awoken before Giga-one, so that I might guard the castle where my brethren sleep. Every new gigagoyle brings me closer to… obsolescence! What am I supposed to do when a musclebound monstrosity comes sauntering up with tusks technically larger than mine and says their name is Gigamillion And One!? Lie down and die!? Let myself be buried under the web surf like some fossil!? No! Never!”

“We don’t want a million of you!” Chaxium assured. “Who would?”

“Excuse me!?” the flabbergasted gigagoyle bellowed.

“What she means to say is-” Ladyspiller said, trying to recover, but it was too late.

“Where’s your gateway?” Million demanded, raising one hand as a visor to scan his domain for their portal. His view was blocked by his own illusion, so he swept his claws to clear Antarctica away, inadvertently creating a window to act that only one of the three fae saw as such. Try as the castle guardian had, the fog would not be immediately cleared away, by order of the captain.

“Get to the egg!” Blizzardime ordered, smashing a bug button so hard it broke, sometimes necessary to communicate to a ferrier the haste needed. Fogfish’s gills gushed in response, spewing bank after bank of streaming mist, soupy enough to serve as an excellent smokescreen.

“Shit,” Chaxium cursed, already launching into a run down the maintenance gangway, toward the spiral stairs to the chin, where they’d lashed Snakewaist’s egg-shaped escape pod.

“If it’s shit, why are we doing it!?” Lady babbled, barely keeping up.

“Because we’re not going to get another opportunity!”

“Get the goyles!” Blizzardime shouted back at them as Fogfish was made to wriggle violently in Million’s grip. “I’ll swing back for you!” Fish ferriers were often designed to be ‘the one that got away’, and Fogfish was no exception as its own vaporized excretions served as lubrication to slip free from the monster’s clutches.

Recognizing the importance of keeping their foe angry and off-kilter, Blizzardime twisted a valve of interwoven merfairy tails, translated into a ferrier response of spinning and slapping Gigamillion in the face with the broadest section of tail. Then Fogfish took off, straight for the castle, foggy trail continuing to obscure most of its body.

The slap threw the couple against the wall hard enough to bruise, but by now they were old enough hats at adventuring that they made the ricochet intentionally dump them into the open hatche between ferrier and subferrier.

Snakewaist’s escape egg was internally ringed with beige cushioned seats and stern crisscrossing safety belts. A dome on the floor, lustrously yolk-like, served as the controls, manipulated by nearby hand gestures so those in the midst of escaping at high velocity wouldn’t have to undo their belts.

A circular swing of Chaxium’s palm, once they were both strapped in, sealed the hatch above, preparing them for the drop. As soon as that seal was communicated to Blizzardime, they were jettisoned by the deactivation of Fogfish’s electromagnetized muscle. Portholes on the egg were small, forcing them to assume that the pixie was using their ferrier to lead Gigamillion on a wild goose chase far from the parapets of Bountybyte.

Which were not far. A cushioning gas membrane between artificial eggshell and fragile fairies kept them from suffering anything worse than whiplash when their subferrier impacted one of the higher towers, rolling a short distance to where a balcony caught them and the perches of the slumbering gigagoyles fenced them away from a more fatal fall.

“Okay, are we good!?” Ladyspiller yipped, head whipping back and forth, glasses drifting off her face from the force but settling back down thanks to the enchantments she kept on them. Even as they returned to their proper place one particular blur did not clear up. “Oh god! We’re not good! Chax, the hatch!”

The lip of it had hit the tower hardest, and it had bent enough to break the seal. That blur was more of a blob, transparent but with a strangely black outline, like a jellyfish traced with shrimp guts. It could only be the raw matter of Fairnet clashing with their pressurized bubble of another reality.

Magics reacted to each other with the same variance of raw elements in chemistry, resulting in a crystallization at the breach that quickly sealed it. The egg’s pressure normalized, but without those two forces at each other’s throats the neutralizing reaction ceased, clipping the blob of jellied internet off the hatch and dropping it onto the control dome.

From there it spread out, forcing the fairies to unbuckle and scramble backward up the curved walls, much more difficult for Ladyspiller without her wings. Gigafive was too terrified of Million to even listen in, but they could hear his voice anyway from years of experience. This disaster just felt like one where he would bleat:

“Oh I told you so! Watch out! That’s pure magidigital essence! If you touch it the body part will be converted into data, which is not compatible with your gooey biological lives! You’ll definitely die and it will look horrendous!”

“Chax, what do we do?”

“We’re okay, I think. There’s not much of it. Just don’t touch it. We can still do this.”

“But the gigagoyles are over there!” Lady stressed, pointing to a porthole with her nose since her hands were busy trying to channel a gecko’s adhesiveness. “We have to roll.” It was the pod’s only means of locomotion.

“If we move slowly it’ll stay on the bottom,” Chaxium said, desperation making her a professor of Earth-Fairnet existential relations. “You just stay up; I’ll control it.” Nodding might have undone her partner’s grip, about as strong as the old spoon-dangling-off-the-nose trick, so Chaxium read the agreement in her unblinking eyes.

Precise as she could, she pushed off the wall and hovered over the control dome so her hands would be free to gesture. A gentle curl and lift of the fingers caressed the pod, sending it tilting toward the nearest perched gigagoyle, its stone tail as inviting of a tug as a watering can handle.

At first it was working, the goo not so viscous that it bunched and flopped. The real problem was that a fairy’s hover wasn’t really that; without a wind to buoy them they were technically descending, which felt a lot more than technical in such cramped quarters. Chaxium had to move in arcs, pushing off the wall each time to then instruct the egg to keep their angle right and their speed low. Her focus was on the yolk-dome, preventing her from realizing her latest trip was going to smack her into Ladyspiller.

Lady winced as Chaxium threw out her limbs and vibrated her wings with tremendous frequency. A breath apart. Dragonfly determination turned wings to weed whacker, spraying globs of Fairnet against the opposite wall to flow down and rejoin the main mass. Her fingers tented beside Lady’s head, her toes scraping alongside her calves. Both recognized their pupils were the same size, establishing a double-ended spyglass through which they each saw what they loved in the other.

“Sorry,” Chaxium puffed. Ladyspiller’s only response was a risk to her grip, heron-striking to plant a kiss in case they were about to die to a gelatinous comments section. As if to punish them for managing to enjoy their adventure, the egg stalled and reversed course. Too fast. Chaxium wrapped around Lady and rolled her to keep her as far from the blob as possible; increased speed had it climbing the side. Until gravity was fed up.

Down it dropped, to surely break up on the dome and scatter. Chaxium kicked off the yolk’s swell, tried to hover with her back toward the slime so Ladyspiller would be protected. There were only so many configurations available to her. Without the hover their feet would’ve been dissolved into data. With it one of the separating droplets landed on a blade of her outstretched wings, pixelating straight through.

“Gyaah!” its victim cried out, turning it into a growl through clenched teeth. Still she had the presence of mind to watch what had just struck through her hit the wall and roll back down.

“It’s a clean hole!” Lady said as soon as she squirmed around and got a look at it. If the blade had its tip severed it might not grow back to its proper shape, but a hole would hopefully heal closed in a matter of days. Through it, and its mechanical cousin, Lady saw the culprit: a gigagoyle pushing on the glass with its kitty-hawk claws. She reached out, past Chaxium’s back, and gestured to make the yolk activate the external speakers before shouting into her headset. “Hey you, stop that!”

Luckily it obeyed, lowering its hands in order to peer inside with the exasperation of a lab animal not given a blueberry for navigating a maze. It clearly mouthed ‘who me?’ before realizing it had been rolling a machine and could just use its gigagoyle abilities to speak directly into their system.

“Who me?” it repeated.

“Yes you!” Lady scolded. “You just about clipped my wife’s wings!”

“Wife?” Chaxium asked, fifty questions in one.

“Not now my precious cinnamon truffle, I’m talking to this hopefully nice gigagoyle.”

“Gigeight,” it self-identified through the channel. “I didn’t know you were in there. It looked like you were going to wake more of us up… and I don’t have anything to do around here so I figured I’d stop it.” The clock was running, and their fishy getaway driver could only deftly navigate its damming hands so long.

“Well now you do what we tell you,” Ladyspiller tried. “You should, right? You’ve been stuck here with nothing to do for years and now we’ve got something. You will right?”

“What is it?” Gigeight asked with narrowed eyes and underbite teeth like the weary chalk of a community college professor.

“Ferriers! You get your own ferrier! Cool, right? But we need to wake up forty-four more for the mission. Only one chance, Eight. In or out?”

“Oh, uhh… in! In! What kind of ferrier do I get?”

“The faster you wake up the others the cooler the ferrier you get! Grab Six through Ten too! Go!” It turned on its white heels and scampered away, leaping onto its first tail and tugging with its whole weight. Two bodies tumbled to the stone, and if the couple’s calculations were correct, that would be Gigeleven, doubtful as it seemed that any other fairies had shown up and made this sort of bad decision.

“We need forty-three more,” Gigeight told the new recruit, “and then we all get ferriers!”

“My double digits are already ahead of you,” Gigeleven said with twice the composure, paw already wrapped around the next tail over. Then there were three. Progress was exponential after that, aided further by Chaxium and Ladyspiller refusing to sit out of the action; they set the perfect angle for the egg to wobble and tap tails all along the parapet while keeping a close watch on their rambunctious slimy companion.

Some details stood out on each gargoyle, horns curved, straight, or spiraling, tails tipped with arrowheads, morning stars, toothed shoehorns, but they all blended together in their flurry of activity like doves and monkeys released en mass. Most of them were double digit, clearly larger than Gigeight, a pattern of development that would with every added integer bring them closer to the colossal Gigamillion, who, were he to enter the realm of mortal physics, probably weighed as much as two English bulldogs. A few smaller ones were mixed in, and they had to be Gigasix, Gigaseven, and Giganine, woken years ago by Five, earning the fairies the animosity that now required Fogfish to burn through its reserve vapor bladder.

Gigafifty-two, Gigafifty-three… Gigafifty-four! Their digital accomplices stopped all at once with enviable precision. A few of them gently grappled the escape pod to make sure the fairies didn’t wake more than necessary.

“Okay… great job!” Ladyspiller panted, to gigagoyle glee. “Now everybody go to the ondashboard computer of the family tree Onthinice to await further instruction! Then you’ll get your ferriers!” There was another round of cheering. Unlike physical beings they needed no specific portal to travel between devices connected to the internet, so they took to the wing on the path of chasing their own tails, blinking away from Castle Bountybyte in bursts like supernova snowflakes.

Once their wings cleared from the air Chaxium and Lady saw that only one pair remained: the biggest. Getting bigger. As were the attached open maw and outstretched raptorial talons. Luckily Fogfish was too, tail swishing like a minnow’s through liquid cocaine.

“Oh shit, he’s gonna snag us with the magnet,” Chaxium said as she rapidly calculated the likeliest momentum shift. Once she had an idea where the blob of digital space would wind up, she embraced Lady and pulled her out of the way. There was a springy crash, fae alloys striking like a bell made of junkyard scraps. Castle Bountybyte disappeared out the porthole, replaced with sky.

Chaxium’s calculations had been correct enough to not get them dissolved into ones and zeroes, so as soon as Fogfish’s flight was stable enough they forced open the crystallized hatch, passed into the ferrier, and sealed the troublesome blob away in its eggshell prison. Making their way back to the cockpit took a stressful while, as every sharp turn Fogfish used to dodge Gigamillion’s swipes threw the fairies against the artificial muscle tissue padding the walls.

By the time they dropped into their seats the doorway back into the Family Roots was dead ahead and alive with the Hex Hounds doing their work on the other side. The different mediums of the two atmospheres didn’t allow sound to travel across easily, but they could see the funneled mouths that told them the hounds were howling triumphantly.

“Fifty-four!” Million roared behind them, his last attack since he knew he couldn’t catch them in time. “Fifty-four of them!”

“It’s not like they’re loitering! We took them off your hands!” Lady tried to persuade, ever ready to turn a pursuit into a friendly footrace full of participation awards. The beast’s only argument was a snarl, one they didn’t have to hear as they shot through the passage between realms.

Gigamillion’s alabaster claws scraped as if it was a window, unable to exist in open air. That was his true embodiment, whereas the Gigafive the fairies were used to seeing was a mere hologram. Once Fogfish was clear the hounds released their rope spells, which dissolved like licorice dropped in acetone.

From there it was a short aerial swim back to the comforting polyester interior of Onthinice, where they were met, well away from the doors and their only-mostly-under-control tourism, by a crack team of post-adventure specialists, always in higher supply than the adventurers themselves.

Two of Onthinice’s medics sat them on bamboo stretchers and pestered the trio with treatments for their minor wounds. The hole in Chaxium’s wings was patched with liquid bandage, which reminded her that there was a much larger quantity of a very similar looking substance pooling in Snakewaist’s subferrier. It wouldn’t be a problem for long, as the solution appeared out of thin air to harangue them.

“I’m not set up for this amount of company!” Gigafive honked, leaping across their laps to hide his concerned examination of their bruises. “Tens of Gigagoyles in my system, all asking where they get to bunk, and after I only just got it organized the way I like. If you two don-” Chaxium’s arm shot out, almost poking a medic in the eye. A silenced Gigafive followed the exact trajectory of her pointing finger.

It landed on the undercarriage egg of floating Fogfish. Invisible sensory tendrils of programmed instinct reached out, visible on Five as just the furrowing of his concentrating brow; they made contact with its cargo.

“Oh,” he said. “Ooh.” The tip of his tail swizzled, Snakewaist’s egg responding by opening its lower hatch. The glob of Fairnet atmosphere fell with a wet plop, droplets separating as perfect cubes that glided a short distance across the floor. Gigagoyle galloped, then dived straight into it. Instead of suffering death by meaty morsel pixelation as the fairies would have, his ivory light-matrix absorbed it all.

Using his tail to poke at the voxel-drops, Gigafive took those in as well. Then he returned to the founders’ side and clearly demonstrated what he’d just crafted by leaping onto a stretcher’s corner. It rattled. His foolish fleshy grin was both the happiest and the drunkest he’d ever looked, and there was something impenetrable about it.

“You’re solid!?” Ladyspiller gasped.

“I’ve neutralized the material’s incompatible base code by patching it with my soulware. Now my will is its physics! I have a body! I can do this!” He launched again, landing heavily on Chaxium’s shoulder so he could shout in her ear. “Try ignoring me now!” The fairy tried something else, namely throwing him.

Actually using his wings would take some practice, so he landed upside down on his head. Speaking in that orientation would also take practice, but he accepted the price of biting his tongue to taunt her, informing them that while he was now substantial, none of that substance would be nerve endings experiencing pain.

“No, the pain’s all ours,” Lady flouted.

“Right in the neck,” Chaxium added, rolling the lingering feeling of his claws off her shoulder.

“This is small recompense compared to what I’m putting up with in this car,” Gigafive claimed, trying out a bipedal walk that combined with his haughty nature to resemble a rotisserie chicken in a marching band assigned the largest drum. “And watch this.” He disappeared, leaving behind a silhouette of clear gel that collapsed a moment later. White light sparkled then flashed inside it before it reformed into the gigagoyle they knew and, on special occasions, loved. “Physical to digital, back and forth whenever I want!”

“That’s great Five,” Chaxium said, temper cooled by the sparkling cup of candied black grape juice forcibly handed to her by one of the medics, “but everything’s actually fine with the other goyles, right?”

“They’re all in one piece and asking me about ferrier customization if that’s what you mean.” His balance failed and he fell over like a bowling pin, doing nothing to interrupt his speech. “I’m assuming I’ll have first pick of this new army of yours, seeing as Geodin isn’t second generation.” Before they could answer the rest of the Spare Changelings arrived, bearing homemade snacks on trays, in buckets, and already staining their shirts. Altogether the mingling scents of wasabi edamame skins, mint chalk, crouton biscotti, asparagus tips on sticks, and sprouted popcorn hand pies nauseated the recovering couple, as did the congratulatory braying of Blizzardime’s siblings.

“Are you a hero?” Quarterfrost asked.

“Yup.”

“Did you kick ass?” Snowpenny specified.

“Yup.”

“Is the name ‘Spare Changelings’ forever immortalized on the web?” Nickelrime challenged.

“Yup.”

There were no more questions regarding the matter among them, not right then or in the future. All that was left was to hoist Blizzardime onto proud shoulders, throw snacks at them so they could catch the ones they wanted, and cart them off to a cushion seam more relaxing. As a final captain’s duty, they turned and shouted at the rest of Fogfish’s crew.

“You guys don’t need me anymore right?”

“No, we’re good,” Chaxium confirmed. “The goyles will help us now. Go and rest, you’ve earned it.”

“I know.”

“We don’t get to relax, do we?” Ladyspiller asked, the question answering itself whether or not her partner spoke. “What’s next?” Chaxium exhaled as if she had long bangs blinding her.

“Logistics.”

Continued in Part Two