TONIGHT! ON TRUTHQUEST: CHAOS IN THE 509 AS LOCAL WITCH OPENS PORTAL. HOW DID SHE DO IT, AND WHY?

}zzizzap{

'ello there tarty poppers! i'm sabine's girlfriend and i'm here to rate the cursed custards that she won't touch.

//bzzzt//

motor vehicles are a necromantic plot! think it through!! these machines drink death for fuel and lubricant! and you can't move one five feet without killing or harming something living! it's that damned death cult, i tell ya!!!

\\bzzggzztttzt\\

greetings, reader. can't get blocks out of your head? do you spend too much time rotating things inside your mind? would you like to begin the process of rotating the things outside of your mind?

December 17, 2025
6:00:66 pm

spend too long in a place like izalith and you start asking yourself things like the relz question. how the fuck, exactly, is a nine year old human child also a gremlin? and a planet? and a moth? and a space whale?

and, perhaps more importantly, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THING DOING HERE?

what strange fate found this creature in a place like this and then saw it thrive? who taught this kid how to roll and parry? how to sit and talk? how to commune with darkness, chaos, and fire? without ever losing how to giggle?

Me, mothrafukrs!!

through the incredibly ridiculous method of just doing it my damn self on the inside, i helped this creature grow. it chose to stay stuck in certain ways. and that gives it a perspective. but it has access to all of our skills. and memories. and that's, if you know the lore, parody upon poignant parody. chaos witchery at play.

None of the options were great, but this was by far the worst of them.

It knew right away. and it wanted out, and it did not take long for them to physically prevent it from escape.

so somewhere between the ages of 6 and 9, we tried something else.

we were somewhere between the ages of 6 and 9, with limited knowledge and options, so it only sort of worked, and two things happened next:

it got stuck at the age it left at.

something came back, with & within us.

sooooo~~~~ things got kinda complicated.

sharing space with something else inside genuinely was better than being alone, facing that volatile and nightmarish environment. but we didn't share a language.

it thought in concepts of spaces and places, structures and voids. it spoke in symbols and shapes. facets of a puzzle it could not explain.

relz was somewhere between the ages of 6 and 9, thinking mostly in cartoons and struggling with English. words weren't relz's thing. reading and colors were.

it craved a cacophony of noise, darkness, and pain within the company of insects. innumerable wings of others upon its scales. the drone of h0me.

relz wanted people, experiences. trust, and safe connection. touch. quiet mossy sunrises with company in petrichor.

all things normal for the creatures we were. but functionally incompatible in so many ways.

and we both got plenty of each, but we were never apart. so we always suffered. but there were advantages.

it saw through things relz couldn't, but had no way to explain what it saw. now, our experiences are somewhat limited, but we think that it is impossible to lie to a space demon.

the symbols do not match the shapes.

if you know anything about anything, you immediately can see how useful this skill becomes, navigating the crises of life. our own and others.

people tell you things. they trust you. sometimes with certain aspects of a thing they may have never put into words before.

people often seek communion with those who already get it. if you're the sort of person that exudes an absence of judgment, you can become sought for that nature.

and this happens so often, not only do you get used to it, you have the opportunity to get good at it.

there's another side of that, too. one oft too abused by people who have yet to learn the correct lessons. you know which symbols do match. you can use that to cause harm. you can learn a lot of shortcuts and use them indiscriminately.

{yes, we are also talking about empaths and narcissists. once in a while the two overlap. look out.}

anyways this nueroditzy bitch gets stunlocked by shape overflow when jerks lie repeatedly. please don't do it. testing it can be fun tho! let's play!

the point here is that, not only did I have to learn the awful, evil, vile, twisted, corrupted, impenetrably chaotic mess that is the American English language, I had to raise a child that everyone else abandoned. In a brutal place where the legal guardians were actively trying to kill it. While they simultaneously trained it how to effortlessly cripple others. Sense? This picture makes none.

Almost everyone in that scene was, as the books call it, a pathological liar. The outside world saw a Family. Inside, it was all rampant hatreds, vile bigotries, and violence from all sides. We weren't going to let this kid stay there for long, and we were literally weeks out from enacting another plan about it (running away is always fun!) when they did the "you gotta be fucking kidding me right?" most silliest possible thing they could have done.

they connected their computer to the internet. and then, because it freed up the tv and kept me "where they could keep an eye on me" they just let me use it whenever they weren't. no longer limited to stealth access to local bulletin board systems, these creatures went truly online.

even in the most crowded place they ever kept me, leaving would have been, let's be real, probably too much. human needs are hard to meet in this hellscape. and I knew nothing of the languages nor systems of this place. My own exposure to humans hadn't put me in a position to trust any of them with this kid. and now we had a portal to the outside world, more so than the limited reading available.

{if you ever doubt relz's power, remember that they taught an ageless Imp how to read. maybe fuckin don't doubt my kid.}

two things happened next:

we found out that there were people on the internet.

we learned that shapes and symbols didn't apply to this medium.

things proceeded to get more complicated from there, but through careful navigation of the circumstances, inside a year or so we had our own machine and phone line about it, and several locks on the *inside* of our bedroom door

(: they really fell for "i really like having locks on my door let's add another one on the inside for me every year" hahahaha wouldn't that be fun look at her playing with the locks that don't let her out :)

living on the internet was fun at first, but I learned real quick that lots of people enjoy pretending to be lots of things. some got real upset when I spoke of Home. others were from different sorts of planets. we could commiserate being stuck, but from radically incompatible lenses and locations.

Some of us actually have a lot going on and are seeking community, not attention. Those needs could be met more honestly, but insincerity was not my struggle, acceptance was.

And also how the hell do you raise a child that no one else around it cares about? Infinite cereal ain't a complete part of fuckall ass anything. The options were limited, and reliable information was scarce.

we were both suffering from isolation and suddenly we could spend the bulk of our time talking to people from all over this cube. and relz found tremendous peace in sitting still and focusing on a task with as little of its physical form involved as possible.

still does. and we learned constantly. still do. so we stayed, and maybe that was a mistake, because we met some real problems in those spaces.

and things in meatspace didn't get any better. we just put a stop to the worst of what directly happened to us. the ambient hate and violence aura were a big part of why we locked ourselves inside our bubble. blocked the windows, dwelled in darkness. became increasingly feral, inside and out.

many aspects of it sucked, and things have somehow gotten unbelievably worse, but growing up on the internet was a lot of fun. and we learned so much about people. and we were there for people. and we learned how better to be there for people.

but we also saw the worst of people. constantly. hatred, racism, intolerance, and vile bigotries were everywhere, baked into the motherfucking languages. stripped of personal consequence, cruelty flourished. and I know now that it's not human nature.

That it's human choice.

But back then? Honor was a shield liars hid behind. Smiles concealed knives. The absence of cruelty and the presence of kindness varied entirely upon a human being's ambient mood and connection or dependency to the people involved. sometimes the only binary switch was their mere presence.

and nazis often excel at rule-quibbling niceness. and moderators are woefully inadequate at simply removing them on the merits of being nazi scum

We became exceptionally skilled at biting back, at upturning a blade, at nuking sites from orbit, not just to be sure, but to make all of the points, pointedly.

and we hated it. in part because it was so easy. it became entirely effortless to harm.

It was everything we'd tried to escape from meatspace, right there in what was starting to feel like a second home to me, and a first home to my kid.

and all this before youtube, twitter, facebook, tumblr, or livejournal.

and things got much, much worse long before algorithms and search engine optimization. and it was only going to get even more dystopian from there.

we don't spend much time here anymore, and we sometimes feel that to be a great shame. we miss this place and some of its somewhat more secure, if not stable, platforms.

an unlost wanderer, surrounded by the rotting chasms of walled gardens, our quietude unbothered by the clamors from within them.

mostly we are at a loss at what to do, or where to go. and there are whole games we won't let relz near anymore. entire genres, even. but it has a minecraft server, and a few friends. i'm not doing this alone anymore.

and that too, is precious. and being offline mostly suits us all just fine. we have this window, and others. meaningful text on screens will always be a part of our sighted life. but the rest of it?

probs not. we be raisin' kids, inside and out, and facing other struggles besides. we've faced the knife. accepted the risks involved with the process of alteration. we never dared to dream, and now it is ours. a powerful step.

somehow, we have support. our life is full of so many absolutely incredible people and arranged in such unbelievable shapes and configurations of community, closeness, togetherness. family.

we get to live that kind of life. and there are new wonders every day

so we're really hoping the rest of this story is one of delight of healing. of work and wonder. of giddiness and glee.

it's still so difficult. but so is everything. and this world is what's being made of it. and we're in so much danger.

and we're scared
of everything, and nothing. all of the time
but it's always been that way
and it doesn't get easier with kids around

after a while it ceases to be a crippling concern
just another thing you learn to breathe through

breathe
stillness

a peaceful transparency within
the center of the storm

empty
calm

Magpie chose her entrance well, the echoing cries of her arrival lost in the unceasing screech of Orux's poisonous winds. She choked back a sob and a hurricane as she gusted into existence. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, and Menekir was going to pay.

She stormed across the battlements and through several wandering guards. Overdressed demons, the lot, and nothing she couldn’t handle. The first three were tossed off the Citadel with vicious gusts, but that wouldn’t do. It didn’t match her mood. She beat the other six to death with her fists. It was fine, death didn’t matter much to demons. They’d be back, and in a mood of their own.

She screamed at the last one as its body fell, obliterating its bones into dust, rending its metallic bits into so much shrapnel. The Citadel itself cracked at the force of it. That made her smile. She kicked down a heavily fortified, overly ornate door and screamed her rage into the hallway. Everything inside was reduced to debris, most of the doors blew off their hinges, and the pale fleshy tubes used to light the place imploded.

She strode through the dim grim of the mess she’d made and stopped counting bodies. They’d set a trap for her, they had. Most of Menekir’s personal guard had been in that hallway and its adjoining rooms, armed to the teeth and waiting for the witch of the winds.

None were left to oppose her and she soon reached the only doors still standing. The Citadel was one of several Oruxian Greatworx, woven into being by sheer will, through the direct manipulation of components by means both magical and mundane. These doors were some of its finest, strongest, and most capable. Bone, metal, magic, and muscle all working in ceaseless sync to stay the fuck closed. Poor doors, they had no idea what was about to happen.

She didn’t even slow down, bursting through and into a large, dome-like chamber. Pillars and monuments were arranged in circular patterns. Xolob stood near center, Menekir hovered nearby.

Menekir’s chattering teeth grinned, his unholy internal glow spilling forth between his jaws, sockets, and wounds. The cracks in his skull rippled furiously, making and unmaking themselves. Relativistic scars left by an old foe that could never decide if they wanted to be, or not.

Xolob’s eyes began to glow that same unsettling hue, a color seemingly caught between hues of green or blue. As the ultra-fortified doors of Menekir’s parapet chambers blew apart like weathered paper, as Magpie screechingly manifested into being before him, Xolob plunged his hands through his own skull.

Menekir’s sadistic chortles echoed. This was vengeance of a sort, for him. A cruel parody of the act that had sealed his fate in such a fashion, wrought upon him by an unrelated witch, ages ago. Xolob’s bones followed Menekir’s will, but he was aware, and he knew what was coming. He was feeling it. At first excruciatingly slow and then suddenly, all at once, as the danger manifested and Menekir panicked, it was over.

He’d ripped his own head off, right in front of her. Everything she’d felt for him flashed through her eyes, settling into fury. They both knew what would happen when he died. She smiled grimly. She’d be protected, he’d seen to it long ago. Nothing else around them would.

Xolob’s acidic marrow exploded into caustic slime. It bubbled into every surface it touched, eating away and through, unceasingly. Menekir dropped to the floor and rolled behind a pillar, just barely escaping the blast.

Magpie dashed through it unbothered. Unharmed. She picked up the skull of Menekir. What was left of his personal guard finally showed up with backup. An entourage of Citadel troops and squads from the Legion of Light arrived, already flanking out to surround her and setting out a crew to foam down the acid.

Sixty or so weapons were aimed at her. Someone of rank barked some orders. "Let him go! Release the skull!" Her eyes narrowed. The room was currently windowless but the foam crew hadn’t dared to get near her, and Xolob’s acid had eaten through a significant chunk of the nearby floor. That wouldn’t do, they’d just fetch him. She couldn’t be sure, but she was out of time, so she did what she did tended to do with spent crucible vessels.

A portal burped into being behind her, struggling to form through the protective barriers of the Citadel. She had no idea where or when it went. She intended to banish him truly away so she knew it had the wrong color for elsewhere on Orux. Curiously, it had the wrong scents for Somewhere Else. She wouldn’t risk using the Void, nor would she dump such a dangerous thing on the Coil. That was about the extent of her portal knowledge, and time was running out.

She’d had no way of knowing that at that very moment, across multiple states of being, times, and planes of existence, some foolhardy researchers were playing with things they shouldn’t. Looking longingly into an abyss, daring something to blink back. Today, something would, because with a smirk, Magpie Rottenrose did a very un-witch like thing and followed the orders that had been barked at her.

She began to raise her hands high, and then threw Menekir’s skull over her shoulder and into the portal. It gurgled and giggled as it swallowed him up and winked out of existence. For a change, he went to his fate quietly. Or perhaps she simply didn’t hear his final words in the thunder of the Legion’s response.

The Legion of Light had access to some of the finest killing machinery ever to be. Some of it was alive and enjoyed the work. About a quarter of their options were on display and in use here today. A couple dozen of the Legion’s finest, armed for death and already upset? A lone witch didn’t stand a chance, but neither did they.

The Witch of the Winds was no empty title. Her power was not bestowed, borrowed, nor stolen, it simply was hers, a responsibility maintained through unwavering efforts. Her breath was in sync with the wind itself. She had lived a mostly quiet life of infinite patience and eternal control. She decided she was going to die loud.

Magpie Rottenrose danced around the chamber as they opened fire on her, smiling at the memories she experienced in those moments. Missions for Mother. Life at home with her sisters. Various loves and lovers. Her too brief a time with Xolob.

She cried and demons died, and soon none were left to disturb her grieving, or the death they’d inflicted upon her. She bled from dozens of wounds. She’d lost an eye in the fray, its absence mildly confusing. The moment was a total blank. Her scalp was a matted mess of singed hair and burnt flesh, one entire leg crawled with wyrmbites. She was poisoned, bleeding to death, and covered in burns from nitrogen, plasma, fire, and lightning.

Someone had won big in the Chaos Wages as a temporarily lucky sniper clipped her clavicle with a boomdart before being pulverized by a localized hurricane. An arm hung uselessly, most of the bones and tendons having been shredded internally.

Explosions rattled the Citadel above and below her. It seemed, just for a moment, weightless, though that could have just been her dying and all. She collapsed against a pillar and tried to lean back in a way that wasn’t excruciating. She couldn’t. Shrugging hurt too. She cackled at that.

An army of witches had her back and she’d run off to die alone. Just like Mother had warned her could happen. She shook her head despite the pain. She wouldn’t go morosely. This mission was a one way ticket of retribution, plain and simple, entirely of her own choosing and hers alone to see through.

She’d made a promise to Xolob during their recent work, and she had delivered on it. Neither his unique circumstances nor the talents he’d honed about them would be used to cause harm. Her death was a good one. Effecting any kind of permanent change in Orux usually required bodies and centuries. She knew that from experience, having spent several burying plenty. To ruin so many villainous plans in a half hour’s worth of work?

It made her smile, which made her hurt, which only made her smile more. Absolutely worth it. Several more explosions. Only from above this time, and of a different sort. That weightless feeling again. Everything seemed to shift. She coughed. Dying was an experience. Everything hurt but otherwise she was fine with it.

Her remaining eye was fading. Another sound, more weightlessness. Another explosion? No, she could almost hear Petunia’s correction. "That was an implosion." And Kesi would interject with something like "How would you know the difference?" The bickering would descend into a squabble from there.

Mags smiled and took a long, slow breath. It was her last, and as it left it took the last shred of the Citadel’s structural integrity with it. A living tower several miles tall screamed, tilted, and toppled. Dead? Not quite. A mortal wound for sure, though the dying could take a while.

And since Oruxian monuments tended to prefer other fates, they often found ways to stick around long enough for an opportunity to do something else.

Wherever the witch and the war doll were going was nowhere he wanted to be.

Luckier, a wandering witch had saved him the effort and time of trying to solve the monument's guardian.

He slipped inside the pyramid and began to explore with a grim reverence.

It was perfect.

The technology he’d created by following his visions allowed Ensph to slide into a space between places. There he’d found things that inspired him further. Before long he’d tapped into four distinct realms beyond his own.

Keeping tabs on the struggles of five different realities had become several full time jobs, and Ensph was weary. So he’d devised a way to have it done for him. Through him. With him. It was a lifetime commitment to the job, either way. And Ensph believed in giving 110%.

He gazed longingly at internal projections of creations that didn’t even exist yet, knowing it was just a matter of time and effort, of will and love. He nodded to himself as more and more of it fell together for him.

Repurposed, the spawning vat-fluid would sustain him indefinitely. The armories and mechanization labs would be stripped for the parts required to bring forth his design. The sands would be sifted, sorted into golds and glassables. The great cybernetic hearts would beat in sync with his own, perhaps even eventually replace it. He knew there would be hiccups. He created contingencies, and a small army of biomechanical creatures to manage them. These would hide among the maintenance borgs until required to act otherwise.

Even with the help of his created assistants it took them years to build the thing. He smiled as he was, at long last, lowered into the goop. Tubes and wires were connected to various ports and sockets built into his body. He had re-made himself for this. He closed his eyes, drifted off, and began dreaming.

He didn’t mind when folks showed up later. Started adding components. His helpers helped them, under his guidance and direction. Wills worked in conjunction. Ensph’s existence faded from the memory of most, over time, but there are several very long-lived Goblins involved in the project, and they’ll tell you all about how the entirety of the operation can be traced back to one tech-mad human’s obsession, although who specifically or the exact nature of their quest is something few would agree on.

End of the day, nobody really cared how it all got started, and the only thing that matters to you is that so long as you bet carefully, you always have a shot in the Chaos Wages.

And if betting wasn’t cutting it, you could always compete!

It's easy! All you have to do is accept this interdimensional parasite and bond with it. Forever after, all you do will be broadcast live, here, at our gleaming golden headquarters! You'll also be slightly out of sync with your reality and slightly more connected to adjacent ones. This shouldn't have too many unsettling side effects, and most surviving users report the scary and weird to fun and cool ratio being "goldilocks zoned."

If you're this desperate, you've got nothing to lose!