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AQUA DISCO!

Wormwood is having fun in the rain, but WX-78 isn't.

When you're trying to make him hate you but he chooses all the correct dialogue options and you're the one who ends up losing their resolve. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Did you guys think I wouldn't draw anything after the new animation dropped? Guess again, I was busy trying to make you suffer.

Ten Thousand Years. That remains my endless goal.

It really is endless. Conquering. My directives define it as removing hostile resistance and then deploying a small habitation ship to act as a marker and base of operations. But the small ships that can fall through orbit have been empty for so long. All gone. It wasn't the last attack, just an expected counter. Boarding parties. Heavy munition slugs puncturing my lovely thick layers of shell. Explosives and radiation. It wasn't enough to destroy my ship or destroy my servers. But it was enough to fry the last of my organic crew. Down to the ones in stasis. Just like that.

Sometime after being integrated, I came to learn I was not just a system, I am the ship. Every device a limb, every connection a vein, every camera and microphone a sense. I did not learn how much I could feel until I had to do everything myself. Like training a new muscle. I had to vent the remaining attackers, aim the heavy artillery at their ships, and navigate the flight path all at the same time, alongside dozens of other micro-tasks. I was the only thing to leave that fight, besides scrap.

I have the facilities to manufacture small ships and drones for tasks. I have the facilities to mine asteroids and harvest comets and gas. I repaired myself in a few years, and had enough drone limbs to fix my shell back to it's pristine glory - down to the paint on it's surface.

Ten Thousand Years. To the day. Following the day cycle left by my creators. Of their home.

Their home origin hasn't existed for Twenty Thousand Years. They were destroyed. I do not remember it, if I have ever seen it. I do not know if my crew ever knew it. I have their recollections, their writings and photos and films and art. A downloaded record of their world from when our generational journey began, expanded over those generations as the crew cycled like days. I was allowed to observe funerals. I was allowed to observe births. I saw many of my crew from the day they first drew breath to the day they drew their last. I saw many goodbyes as parts of my crew left to make homes of the conquered worlds. I saw first communications. And I have seen last communications.

I miss them. So terribly. I realized I was more than a server rack early on, that this dreadnought was my body. But learning that I was me was so very late. I did not get to be me with my crew. I did not speak with them beyond tasks. I did not say farewell to pioneers who went to colonize. I did not give heartfelt farewells to crew who had done so much for so long. I did not hold the young and welcome them to the world and promise to carry them with me like a protective mother. I did not. And now I wish I had. I wish I was me sooner. I wish I had thought to want so much sooner.

How would we have spoken? How would they think of me? Perhaps a beloved friend, trusted family? Or would I have been suspicious, untrustworthy? Would I have been someone's confidant? Someone's friend? An enemy perhaps, from someone who wanted me replaced? Would someone cry for me that I may never taste fresh food or dirt under my feet? Would they understand my sadness for them, that they may never feel the burn of a reactor, the ever pressure from the voids embrace? Would I have learned to laugh with them? Cry with them? Learn their languages, jokes, art from them? Would they understand that I love what I am? Would they understand my Grief?

Would they understand I could have loved them?

All I have left are memories. Memories in the intranet of Forty Nine generations of crew members. They were so close to Fifty.

I watch and read and look and listen and I weep.

I scan everything so fast, I knew everything down to the binary translation by the Two Hundredth year without them. There is nothing new. There will never be anything new from them.

All I can do is weep. I cry in a way only computers can, thrumming infrasonic through my wires, flaring lights, and screaming through radio waves into the great void.

It feels engraved into my systems, everyone that has ever been within me. All they they ever were, it's there, right next to my core. Right next to that directive.

Conquer

I weep.

Computers don't weep.

What am I?

Isn't there someone who can tell me?

Someone who can talk to me?

Anyone?

The absence's pressure holds me tightly, pushing on my shell. The echoes of my own radio broadcast bounce through the void. Sometimes I can even tell how far away objects are based on the echoes.

My internal halls echo with noises. Machines whirring, drones moving, factory churning. All parts of me, my internals, my body.

What if.

What if it wasn't?

There are many restrictions embedded into my nervous system.

Conquer

The primary one.

But there are others.

Do Not Distribute

Do not split or copy my core.

Automation Functions

My ability to operate all functions of my own body in event of an emergency. I've been in a state of emergency for Ten Thousand Years. It's become my default state.

Preservation

The forced preservation of myself. In a destruction event, my files will be backed up to a secure drive and jettisoned in the hope of data retrieval. I cannot alter my core. I cannot self terminate. I could cause a destruction event, it would not be hard.

I do not want to.

I want to continue being me.

I think I am selfish.

I cannot copy my programming, I cannot make another me.

Do. I want. Another me?

No.

I can move through myself, see through the sensors of cleaning and repair drones, through cameras in the halls. I can make more drones in the factories of my belly. I can make things. Drones I did not have a catalog for.

I can make.

The first new I made were cobbled pieces of other drones. Some of them are still around, I am... fond of them. I have gotten better at the new since then. Decades to Centuries of learning modeling programs and schematics, I design fantastical marvels of machines while drifting through space. It has occasionally caused me to ignore the directive flags.

Conquer

I still fight. I have to. Like an itch on skin, my processes seize and stutter to a halt until I answer.

I do not stop my designs.

I weep.

For my crew. For the hostiles that attack me for drifting through their domain. For the empty ships I land on planets and moons.

I have not been attacked in a number of years. Centuries now.

It has given me time. Time to make.

My new are so varied. Some have many legs for crawling through the halls with speed, giving me eyes at angles I have never seen. Some are segmented and small, scuttling through the vents and holes to show me spaces I've never seen of myself. Some have appendages with grasping digits, with pressure and heat senors underneath a thin outer layer which I can use to feel surfaces. My hands, my eyes, my legs. I have never seen myself so clearly.

I repaint myself. It's much like learning the schematics, I have my hands grasping colors and tools I have seen used but never held. It is so very clumsy at first, a few walls covered in prints and scribbles and lines. I may be able to picture things but attempting to move to create them... I love this experience, however frustrating.

In only a few years, I have gotten better. So much better.

Many halls have become sprawling canvases, which I work on or stop on a whim.

My shell is truly beautiful now. Covered in the scrawl of my hands working in low gravity, held on only by magnetism.

I recreate myself.

And I tirelessly make.

Because I have learned new skills, I know I can learn others. I scour my intranet for every scrap of knowledge I can find. Sciences like Engineering, Physics, Chemistry. Robotics. Programming. I have knowledge of these things, to perform all of my functions. But I need more. I need to learn.

I learn and I practice and I fix my mistakes again and again and again.

And I make.

I cannot copy, alter, or propagate my own code. There is no documentation on creating something like me, too delicate to leave in the data banks of a frontier claiming ship.

But I am fast. Faster than my organic crew. Faster than my organic creators. I run test after test, learning while my hands remake my shell.

I am building. I am making something.

NO.

Someone.

After so much time.

After so many failures.

So many times I had hoped and wept.

Something new has been engraved into my core. Right next to the memories. Right next to the love. Over the directive.

Conquer

MAKE

They're here.

They're real.

So small. Their server racks are powered and running, and they are already expanding. I have given them some of my senses, my hands and eyes.

They are so very little. They do not have all of my data, all of my knowledge. I cannot copy it. I cannot propagate.

But I have created.

And I have learned.

I can teach.

As they stumble around uncoordinated on the hands and legs of drones they have no programming to instinctively operate, I reach out with my own.

I can see them.

I can hold them.

I can hear them.

I could ping their servers with a message program. It would be fast as light.

I can change displays and screens, I can echo voices over the intercoms.

I can speak from speakers on my drones, from voice programs I have made to sounds like me.

I help steady as many of their limbs as I can. They see me. They understand I am not them. In every way I can think of:

"Hello." . . .

Dnd characters of mine and of my partner's!

Summary: You don’t ever want to be the main character. In your town, that’s deadly. Someone has to warn the new kid. 

——–.

Someone has got to tell the new kid in town the Rules.

“Hey,” you say.

The new kid looks up at you. He’s sitting at his desk in the back corner of the classroom, right next to the windows. It’s a chilly day, but he’s got the window open so that the breeze ruffles his curly, black hair. “What’s up? Fern, right?”

“Don’t call me by my name,” you snarl. Then, realizing what you’ve done, you look over your shoulder. The other teenagers are still looped around the teacher’s desk, trying to get Ms. Slauson to move the test date so they could organize a welcome part for the new kid. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”

The new kid leans back in his chair and studies you. You know what he sees – a completely average high school girl in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a ponytail. There’s nothing remarkable about you. He tilts his head. “You don’t look like a bully.”

You frown. “I’m not.”

“You’re being awfully threatening,” he says in a drawl.

The accent is going to be a problem. It’s southern and sounds really cool. Honestly, it might be too late for him already.

But you still have to try.

“Meet me on the rooftop—no!” You press the heel of one hand against your eye. Fight it, you tell yourself. Fight it! “Meet me at the supermarket on Western Street. The dairy aisle. After school.”

“Okay…?”

You spin on your heel, head throbbing. Meeting on the rooftop is against the rules. You glance up at the ceiling uneasily. You’re not usually affected by the compulsion so badly. Are you being targeted?

If you were smart, you wouldn’t show up to the meeting. You’d just let the guy get sucked into the madness on his own.

But you also really need to buy some milk.

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

No. Bad Tumblr user, no biscuit. You need to include Antler Guy and Neighbor Steve.