We had to wake up the children before too long, unfortunately. All of us (including the kids) would have preferred to let them stay virtual, but they needed to eat and excrete and that was when we discovered that we hadn’t brought a toilet. The obvious solution was to take them into the cockpit one at a time, cover their fur in oil so they wouldn’t get too cold, and then let them pee into the ocean a few meters away from the crawler. The water was still mostly opaque, which made me nervous, but Star was able to make a sonar module that would warn us of approaching sharks.

But we had eighteen kids and three of us and everyone needed to pee… and ‘potty trained’ didn’t mean as much as we might have wanted when they really needed to go but to get through everyone was going to take three hours.

“Couldn’t you just let them go into the matter compressor?” I asked Star, after the kids decided through some mutual consensus to make a game out of spraying urine everywhere.

Star’s faceplate showed a twisting collection of lines. “We didn’t bring a matter compressor.”

Worse, we couldn’t build a matter compressor with the materials we had on hand, which weren’t nearly as much as we’d had on hand before we accidentally left all our matter compressors in the old lair. We weren’t *that* bad off but compressors needed a lot of metal and we mostly had rock and organics.

“How are we going to dig a new lair without a matter compressor?” I whined. The warp crystal could make rock soft but it still had to go somewhere, as the ‘Floor is Lava’ incident had demonstrated.

Fire shook his head. “We’ll just have to find a big enough cave to move into and worry about setting up a labyrinth later.”

The good news was that once Star heard about our buoyancy problems they were able to solve it in approximately thirty seconds by letting some water in to pool at the bottom of the cargo area. “It’s called ballast, dummy,” they told me. “How did you live on a pirate ship for weeks and not learn about ballast?”

“That’s not even a word,” I insisted, but it worked and our crawler was able to crawl again. Fire let me drive while he kept an eye on the sonar.

Of course it made the cargo area even more miserable since now it not only smelled like pee but also had seawater splashing all over everyone and everything. Some of the fabricator elements were lighter than water and started floating and bumping against each other until Star printed out a bunch of stretchy nets and tied them down. The kids were mostly conscious and screaming and climbing on things and somehow two of them got into the cockpit – one kept pushing random buttons on the control panel and the other kept trying to jump out into the ocean but Fire picked them up and held them still while they wiggled and complained.

Then the sonar started beeping. “Why is it doing that?” I asked, steering with one hand while I shooed the baby kobold away from the environmental controls, which I was about 75% sure weren’t actually hooked up to anything since we’d had to rush our departure.

“I don’t know!” Fire shouted back, struggling with the baby in his arms which didn’t like the beeping any more than I did. “It just says ‘danger’ but there’s nothing on the scope!”

“Well, can you shut it off before I –” I started to say, before the whole crawler pitched forwards off the edge of a cliff, and started to slowly spin, front over rear, as we sank. Murky water flooded in through the floor hatch as the air bubbled out, and I couldn’t even see the controls or tell which way was up.

When we finally stopped moving, it was with a disturbing crunching noise that I could feel through my seat. “Is everyone okay?”

Star sent back, “No we’re not okay all the kids are terrified and we’re upside down and losing air WHAT DID YOU DO!”

The good news was that we’d landed with the cockpit upside down and only half embedded in the seafloor – we could swim out through the hatch in what was now the ceiling, and opening the other hatch to the cargo bay only flooded it a little more than it already was. We were also able to help Star patch the cracks in the hull with duck tape.

The bad news was that it was obvious that the crawler would never survive the stress from being flipped back upright, even if we found something to let the winch tug it in the right direction. What was left of our fabricator was strapped to the ceiling, now, hanging in stretchy nets that kept us from getting to it to actually use it, and cutting the nets would just send it crashing down on our heads. The water outside was still opaque from the earthquake, our sonar was buried in muck and nonfunctional, and our dear children decided that it was a good time to escape from the crawler and go play hide and seek in the wild, shark-filled ocean.

“Is it too late to tell Luna to come back and make us her pets?” I asked, sinking into the pee-water.

“I’m pretty sure that ship has exploded,” Fire said, “I’m going to go find the kids.” He vanished into the murky water.

“Go dig out the sonar and switch it to terrain mode,” Star suggested. They were fiddling with the lower corner of the net, presumably working on a way to get the fabricator down. “Maybe there’s a nice cave close enough to walk.”

“It has a terrain mode,” I said. That would have been useful to know five minutes ago, I didn’t say. Star’s ears flattened against their head, so I think they heard it anyway.

I don’t know how long it took to dig blindly into the muck until I found the sonar unit, or how long I spent trying to pull it off by tugging on it before Star reminded me that it was bolted in place. I got a wrench from Star to unbolt it, but the bolts were fused and twisted from the impact, so I went back in and got a saw. I don’t know how long it took to saw through the mount so that I could get the sonar free.

I stood there holding it for a few minutes until Star noticed and talked me through connecting its display to my faceplate and switching to terrain mode, which gave me a wireframe outline of the seafloor and the cliff superimposed over my otherwise obscured vision. I struggled through the muck at the base the cliff for a long time, and made it maybe fifty meters from the crawler, before I noticed a hole in the cliff above me, twenty meters up and ten meters back.

Kobolds aren’t buoyant, but it’s still a lot easier to climb underwater, even if one of your hands is full carrying a bulky sonar array. There was a current coming from the cave, though, and it knocked me loose and I slowly fell back down to the seafloor. I sat there half-buried in the muck for a few minutes, then stood up and trudged back to the base of the cliff and started climbing again.

This time, when I got to the cave, I forgot I was underwater and cracked my faceplate to hold the sonar in my teeth. My mouth filled with salty water, and I had to hold my breath to avoid inhaling any of it. But with two hands free I was able to pull myself up into the cave, against the current, which turned out to be pretty faint. Strong enough that the water stopped tasting as salty, at least, and wasn’t all muddy besides. I could see, a little, although the wireframe drowned it out until I turned down the brightness.

I shifted the sonar back to my hands and closed my faceplate so that I could breathe, after swallowing the water left in my mouth. The tunnel got a bit brighter as a pair of eyespots and a distressed, jaggy mouth-line appeared on my faceplate, and I wondered how long it had been blank.

“I found something,” I sent to the others. “It’s pretty small.” It was about a meter across, with a circular cross section, which was plenty large enough for a kobold to walk through with no issues, but most of the fabricator elements were meter-wide cubes or larger and wouldn’t fit. “Some sort of underground river. There’s a current, but I can walk against it.”

“This is promising!” Star sent back. “See if it comes from a cave!”

I trudged upstream for a while, against the current. The tunnel branched a few times, but I used the sawed-off edges of the sonar’s mounting bracket to scratch an arrow telling me which way I’d come from. I was using the sonar to navigate since its wireframe reached much further ahead than my vision, and was wondering at the strangely flat ceiling on a wider section up ahead until I noticed distorted torchlight from behind it and realized it was the surface of the river I was following, or maybe even a small pond given its size.

Unfortunately, with the crystal-clear water and my own glowing icons and faceplate, my approach did not go unnoticed. I probably would have been able to dodge the net if I’d been paying attention, but the ripples it made in the wireframe of the surface confused me long enough to get snagged. I was dragged up out of the water, onto a rocky shore, surrounded by diamond dogs.

The other dogs were laughing at the one who’d pulled up the net. “Ha ha, you catch a sea dog!” “We can’t eat that, throw it back!” “Look at its shinies!”

Fire had tucked the warp crystal amulet under my chestplate while he was oiling up my fur, so I was already touching it. I imagined the dragon long enough to turn the net into mush, but didn’t break out of it yet. “Hello to you, too,” I said.

I felt a little bad, because the next thing they tried to do was free me from the net but I’d already destroyed it. “Sorry,” didn’t really make up for it, but it was a ratty old net made of ropes so it couldn’t have been that valuable. They were mostly scared instead of angry, and very careful not to touch me.

“You come with us, sea dog,” one of them said. “Talk to old bitch.”

“I don’t know,” I said, not really feeling up to talking to anyone, let along anyone important. “I’m looking for a nice empty cave, and apparently I didn’t find one since this one is yours. I should go.”

The herded me away from the water, still careful not to actually touch me. “We have lots of caves! Maybe she finds one for you.”

“I’m being kidnapped by diamond dogs,” I sent back to Fire and Star. “Or maybe invited for a friendly chat. I’ll keep you posted.” Only I wouldn’t, because it immediately bounced with ‘error: no connection’. I guess I’d walked too far up the river with no repeater.

It was hard to tell how many diamond dogs were living in the caves, because they were caves connected by burrowed tunnels and I didn’t see anything that looked like a central encampment. They didn’t have traps set up as such, but a couple of times I saw diamond dogs pop out of the walls – or vanish into them – like they were digging through cake. The ambush tunnels that had killed captain Pareto – it hadn’t been some brilliant plan, they’d *improvised*.

The Old Bitch lived in what looked like a natural cave, lit by very unnatural flames on candles that looked like they were screaming in agony. Her back was to us as we came in, scarred and twisted, with the stub of a tail twitching against the velvet cushion beneath her. Her ears perked as we stepped through the door, and she grabbed a cane and levered herself up on her feet, then shuffled around to face us, squinting her one good eye, the other sealed shut by yet another scar.

“What is this you bring me?” she asked.

“We catch a sea dog in the net,” said the fisher-dog. “She’s cursed.”

“Cursed, are you?” the old diamond dog asked me, mouth open in what looked like a laugh but sounded like croaked, labored breathing.

“That would explain a lot,” I said, “but curses aren’t real.”

“Aaah, how precious, like a legend come to life,” she cackled. “This is no sea dog, foolish fisher. This is an old dog.”

“I’m a kobold,” I said.

“Kob dog, old dog,” the old bitch said, waving a paw dismissively. “What are you doing alive, ancient one?”

Well, we had had our suspicions. “If I had to guess,” I said, “I took the long way ‘round.”

“So you do, so you do,” she said, absently. “But why do you come to us now?”

“She is looking for a cave,” said one of the diamond dogs who’d escorted me in. “Probably to raise her pups.” He wilted a bit under the old bitch’s stare. “She’s pregnant.”

“Ha! How old do you think I am?” the old diamond dog snarled. “I can smell she’s pregnant. A dead pony could tell that much.”

“You don’t look a day over five hundred,” I said. “Which makes me wonder how you know anything about us.”

“Ha!” she snapped. “Bold dog, are you? I am the chaos-keeper of this tribe. I hear the stories and retell them, and so we remember even when the world goes mad.” She pointed her cane at me, the gemmed rod shaking in her grasp. “We remember your kind – how you breed like a scourge until the world is drowned beneath your tide.”

“What? No!” I said. “Why does everyone keep assuming that we’re going to breed out of control? We need to build a civilization in a hurry but we can stop laying eggs anytime we want. It’s like flipping a switch.” I threw up my hands. “We need a few million… a few hundred million kobolds, but a planet like this can hold *trillions* and we came prepared to do without it if we had to. We’re not going to take your land or drown anyone beneath anything!”

“You believe that, do you?” the old bitch said, squinting at me some more. Then she shrugged. “Ha! It isn’t our problem. If you overstep, the creatures of harmony see to your fate.”

“Harmony is here?” I said, ears flat, mouth jaggy, fur failing to bristle under all the oil but doing its best to try. I should have known. As soon as we thought of the possibility that others had gotten here first, we should have guessed that the hive mind might have come with them!

“Not underground,” she said. “We fear them as well. If you wish to hide with us for a time, we can find a little space. If you wish to become a numberless swarm, you need to go elsewhere.”

“A little space for a little while is fine,” I said. What were we going to do?! “I need to go talk to my friends.”

“Go, go,” she said, waving her cane. “Go fetch the rest of your horde.”

“We prefer ‘collective’,” I said, numb, then turned to walk back through the caves. The diamond dogs claimed not to be part of Harmony… but what about the Nyx? They didn’t seem like mindless drones but that could just mean that Harmony had gotten better at faking. Or gotten better at respecting individuality? No, no, that was what they’d want us to think to trick us into joining.

“Are you really giving them a cave?” one of the diamond dogs asked the old bitch once I was out of the room.

“There are other legends about the old dogs,” she replied, “Let me tell you the story…”

I didn’t stay to listen; I was too busy imagining doomsday scenarios, and then I got lost in the caves and had to ask for directions to the fishing hole, but apparently they had something like six fishing holes? The diamond dogs were patient – apparently they all thought I was a ‘sea dog’, whatever that meant, and they were friendly with sea dogs – and I found the right one on the second try.

My markers were not as obvious as I’d hoped, and at one point I came to an intersection that wasn’t marked at all, probably because coming from the other direction it wasn’t obviously an intersection. The wrong passage was narrower than anything I’d remembered, though, so I didn’t have to guess, and the challenge of navigating the natural labyrinth was a welcome distraction.

Before long I was back at the entrance to the cave, and was bombarded with Fire and Star’s worried messages, at the same time as my own queued message automatically got sent to them. So, there were half a dozen variants on ‘I guess the cave is deep enough to block transmission, should we start moving in? Oh wait you can’t read this,’ and then “Kidnapped!”

But before reading through them, I’d added my own urgent message, “Harmony is here and can hack into our network!!!!!”

I followed up with, “Oh and the diamond dogs offered to let us use one of their caves as long as we don’t become a numberless swarm.”

“It’s a trap,” Fire said, once we all went virtual so that we could talk in real time instead of sending messages. “They want us where they can get us all at once.” He was still wearing the incredibly muscular dragon avatar he’d been using for the lava bath.

“Harmony?” Star asked.

I shook my head. I was also a dragon, although I was just using my pink dragon avatar, which I’d adjusted slightly to match what we knew about Ash. “I assume he means the diamond dogs. Most of them seemed to think we were ‘sea dogs’ whatever that means, only the one old one knew we were kobolds. Or mistook us for ‘old dogs’ but she seemed to be describing kobolds.”

“Shouldn’t we be talking about the hive mind?” Star said. They were floating around as a geometric shape again, but still managed to be all jaggy.

“It’s not as urgent as whether or not to trust the diamond dogs,” Fire said. “Which we should not. They didn’t ask for payment, or any concessions. They’re trying to lure us in so they can wipe us out.”

“That’s… possible,” I admitted. “They seemed a lot more playful and friendly than that. Do you really think it was a ruse?”

“I do,” Fire said. “Star? You’re the deciding vote.”

“Um…” Star froze for a few seconds. “I’m not comfortable being a deciding vote. But I guess I’d have to go with Wave since she was there.”

“It’s not a vote,” I said. “We need to reach a consensus. Or split the collective, I guess, but…”

“I’m not going to abandon you two,” Fire said. “That’s why I asked for a vote. If both of you are sure, then we can walk into the obvious trap.”

“No, wait,” I said. “We should split.”

“Explaaaaaain?” Star asked.

“If we don’t all walk into the hypothetical trap, they won’t spring it right away because they want to get all of us, right?” I said. “We can imply that some of us stayed behind because they wanted to watch and see what happened before committing. That should buy us some time.”

Fire nodded, unconvinced. “But you’ll still be trapped.”

“With a little time we can give them reasons to keep us around,” I said. “Yes, I can offer sex, obviously, but also we can just make friends with them. At least for their rank and file, their first impression of us is as allies, which should help. And once we get the fabricator sorted out we can start making gems. They like shiny things.”

“And headsets for access to the virtual world,” Star added. “Everybody loves the virtual world.”

“Fine, fine,” Fire said, shaking his head. “I can go with that plan. But how about instead of leaving me out here by myself, I come in with you and we just pretend there were more of us? If you’re going to trick someone you might as well lie.”

That made sense.

“So…” Star said. “About Harmony.”

“I might be overreacting,” I said. “But the old bitch – that’s what they called her! – she said that ‘Harmony’ would take care of us if we tried to take over the world. And I was thinking about how there’s all this ‘magic’ that people use without knowing how it works, and the Nyx’s dream cauldron that can *mysteriously* log into our network, and… um. It would explain some things.”

“If they got here first, then our whole mission is pointless,” Star said. “Unless we think we can start running faster?”

“We could steal their FTL?” Fire suggested.

“If they really have perfect FTL and are just trying to avoid violating causality, they could have been everywhere in the universe the instant they invented it,” I said. “If we want to get *anywhere* first we’ll have to violate causality ourselves, assuming their tech can even do that.”

“They obviously didn’t go *everywhere*,” Star said. “They weren’t waiting for us back home.”

I blinked. I hadn’t thought of that. “Right, right, okay. So it’s not a worst-case scenario. And maybe they’ve changed? The Nyx didn’t seem like drones.”

“Oh, they never seem like drones,” Star said. “That’s how they getcha.”

We woke up the kids for the trip, because it was already going to be trouble enough hauling the pieces of fabricator. Star netted together the buoyant machines with heavier machines until we had three long bundles of almost neutral density. Mine wanted to float a little, but not enough to lift me off the seafloor. Star took the heaviest and strapped it to their back.

“You need to come with us,” we told the kids. “We found a nice dry cave.”

“Line up and sound off,” Fire ordered, and they formed a ragged line and counted to eighteen, although the one after eleven said ‘thirteen’, and sixteen needed to be prompted three times.

I took the front of the line, since I knew where we were going and had the warp crystal to soften the rock to let us squeeze the fabricator in, since the largest pieces were a bit bigger than the cave. Star and Fire were originally going to take the middle and the back but every time I looked back at them they were running off to herd one or another of the kids back into line, so that never really panned out.

It turned out that lifting the cargo twenty meters was not the hard part. The hard part was shoving it into the underwater river without having it squirt back out like a bullet from a gun. After a couple of amusingly frustrating failures, I turned all the rock around the edges into cake and swirled the package around like a giant stylus, letting the current carry the dust away. If we’d had infinite patience, we probably could have just let the current do all the work, but I didn’t so I helped it along. Once the passage was two meters across, the current was weak enough to walk upstream. Fortunately, the tunnel widened out by itself with every branching we passed, so after a hundred meters or so I was able to give it a rest and we all just walked upstream single file.

When we finally got to the lake, we had sixteen children with us.

“Oh… god damn it,” Fire said, after counting. “Don’t let any of the others wander off, I’ll go find them.”

“Don’t get lost!” I said.

Some of the kids kept trying to make a break for the shore, so we brought everyone up out of the water to meet the diamond dogs. I didn’t recognize any of them and they weren’t fishing, but they were willing to stop and chat with the ‘sea dogs’ and make appropriately adoring noises at the children until the kids stopped being terrified of the big hulking brutes.

Somehow they’d signaled the old bitch, because she showed up a few minutes later. “This everyone? I think there are more,” she said.

“No! And no, and yes?” I said. “Fire’s off finding a couple of kids who got lost but –"

“Kids?” she frowned. “You call your pups kids?”

“Yes? I mean, it’s not an official term. Is it?” I asked Star.

“I don’t think it is,” Star said. “I’ve heard ‘pups’ before too.”

“We hatch them from eggs, so I’d think ‘chicks’…”

Star shook their head. “I’ve never heard chicks.”

“We call them a lot of things,” I told the old bitch.

She nodded. “We wait here for them then. Cave is pretty far.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the no longer neutrally buoyant bundle I was supposed to carry, which was really quite heavy out of the water. “Do you have something with wheels we could borrow? Otherwise we might have to make several trips.”

“Perro! Fido!” she snapped. Two of the diamond dogs stopped playing with our… pups and stood up facing her. “Help the old dogs carry their stuff.”

I shrugged. “I guess that works too.”

Fire came back after a few minutes, *three* pups in tow, and we did another count, and got sixteen again.

“The other two go off with Rover,” Perro said. “They want to explore.”

“Alright,” I said, still a little worried about them but no longer confident that we could ever get all eighteen to stand still. I told the old bitch, “This is everyone who’s coming, then. Not everyone wanted to come live with you… the Nyx said some nasty things about you and it scared them off.”

“Who are the Nyx?” she asked.

“Moon spirits,” I told her. “We came from the moon. Most recently.”

She frowned, then shrugged, waving to us as she turned her back on us to lead us away from the water. “Cave is this way.”

“Soooo,” asked Star, as the diamond dogs led us into their labyrinth. “What’s this about Harmony?”

The old bitch explained Harmony to us, as she understood it. Understands it. Harmony was a force that connected everyone on the planet and controlled their destiny. The diamond dogs were mainly beneath its notice – literally, it didn’t normally look underground – but other races were firmly in its grip, especially the ponies (like Princess Luna) where it went so far as to brand a symbol into their fur.

I’d thought that the moon on Luna’s hips was like our icon, but it was so much worse! ‘Harmony’ or ‘Destiny’ (it wasn’t clear if they were the same thing, but they were connected) would assign a pony a symbol, and then would partially take over their mind to help them complete any related task, and give them a quick emotional boost whenever they performed it, training them to accept it as their purpose in life.

Sometimes Harmony (definitely Harmony this time) would also just grab every pony in range and force them to cooperate on something. You could tell when it was doing that because they’d all start singing in harmony and doing choreographed dances. It sounded really, really creepy, and non-ponies could get dragged into it so it wasn’t like ponies were the only drones, just the ones with the heaviest load.

Also it would sometimes outright blast troublemakers and either rewrite their personalities completely or turn them to stone, which was *not* death apparently but more like a sort of long-term stasis, because at least one person had come back from it. All of that was a secondhand rumor even to the diamond dogs, though, so I wasn’t sure how much stock to put in it.

“But most of the time they’re individuals?” I asked.

“We always feel like individuals, even when we’re dancing to its tune,” the old bitch replied.

“It’s how they getcha,” Star messaged me.

The cave they led us to was smaller than I expected – maybe ten meters on a side, although it was irregularly shaped, without any flat surfaces. The entrance was near the top, and it was impossible to tell how deep it was, because it was full of garbage – bones, offal, random broken wood and metal things, and piles and piles of diamond dog shit, the surface about a meter down from the opening.

“It needs a little cleaning,” the old bitch said. “Nothing comes free. You learn this lesson first, if you stay with us.”

Star was like a kid in a candy store. They leapt down into the filth and gathered up a huge handful of garbage, holding it up for me to take. “Load it in the hopper! This is great stuff!”

“This really looks like a job for a matter compressor,” I said, gingerly scooping up the oozing pile. Perro danced back from me when I approached. It probably smelled really, really bad – bad enough that my faceplate started filtering out the stench. “Set it down and unwrap it,” I told them. “Then you can run away.”

The old bitch looked bemused, then turned and left us to our work.

The first thing we made was not a matter compressor. It was a playpen to shove the kids into, so that they didn’t jump in the garbage and get lost, with little wheels so that we could move it into the cave once it was clear. We counted fifteen baby kobolds, and put them all into virtual reality, and then Fire ran off to find the sixteenth (we were trusting Rover to bring the seventeenth and eighteenth back with them) while I helped Star load more trash into the machines.

The second thing we built was a forge – sort of like a mini-printer for sturdier things made out of ceramic and metal. It took metal to build, but the trash had enough metal for our purposes.

The *third* thing we built, once the forge was complete, was a matter compressor. Well, we’d also printed a bunch of shovels and sacks and more stretchy nets and ropes, and a repeater to set up down the tunnel at the first intersection to give us a little more coverage, but that was all minor stuff.

With the matter compressor, cleaning out the rest of the pit was a lot more tolerable, since all the squishy, liquid stuff could get sucked in through the hose and we only had to deal with large pieces of rotting wood (that we needed to break down so they’d fit) and all the rusty metal, which we didn’t want in the matter compressor anyway – not in the same matter compressor at least.

I had the food processor start making pure water, and just left it spraying down into the hole so that we could rinse things (and ourselves) off.

Rover found us, carrying two sleeping baby kobolds, when we were about five meters deep. I helped him put them in the playpen, then activated their virtual reality.

“You live in the old garbage pit?” he asked, backing away from me since I’d rinsed off a bit, but still wasn’t what you’d call ‘clean’.

“We will, once we clean out all the garbage,” I said, with a shrug. “You can keep bringing garbage here if you want. We can recycle anything.”

Fire returned with the missing number sixteen at about seven meters, and volunteered to stay far away and start setting up more repeaters. “Don’t cut yourself on anything sharp,” he warned us. “There’s probably enough bacteria in that mess to eat you alive.”

Star didn’t have to worry, of course, since their hands and feet were already artificial, but I made myself some heavy gloves and boots, in case I needed to go down there for some reason.

When the pit was eleven meters deep and showed no sign of bottoming out – it was actually getting *wider* – we decided to take a rest. I helped haul Star out of the pit, and we made some soap and cleaned each other off. The filth had gotten under our rigs, so we needed to take everything off and wash it separately – well, not our cybernetic limbs, since the seal was watertight. We did wash under our faceplates, though, and MY GOD the stench.

“Once we get all the solid garbage loaded, we can spray everything with bleach,” Star said, after getting her faceplate back on. “It’ll probably still stink for a while unless we can find some way to clean the air, though.”

“Smelling like garbage is not going to make us popular,” I said. “If they’re really out to get us, this might be part of their plan.”

After resting for a while, we decided that living in a smelly hallway while we mined infinite garbage was not ideal, so instead of jumping back into the pit, Star spent a little of the materials we’d already collected building a floor for the pit, and we installed it ten meters down, just before the pit started to widen. Fire helped – he had the most experience with that sort of medium-scale construction, since he’d used a lot of it for the traps he’d set for Ash. It had a hatch with a gel-membrane barrier, so that we could stick the hose through to suck up more garbage, or squeeze through ourselves if we wanted to retrieve some larger pieces, without letting more of the stink out. To deal with the existing stink, we used lots of bleach to clean the walls, and installed an air processor that was really meant for aerating habitats in toxic atmospheres, but overkill against the stench felt (and smelt) pretty nice, honestly.

Then we put in a bunch more floors, because we had the vertical space and the lair was otherwise pretty small. We ended up with six stories, about a meter-and-a-half each, which was comfortable for kobolds but would make most diamond dogs need to duck, which we hoped would keep them away. The very top level was large enough for them, but that was our public lounge where they were welcome.

“Do you think we should set up some traps in the hallway?” I asked, once it was all done, if a bit unfurnished. The playpen was down on floor three, the fabricator machines on four and five, while six was for storing and cleaning the metal bits. The matter compressor was still up in the corridor because it was far, far too heavy to move.

“I’ll work on that,” Fire said. “Friendly traps for now. It’s not much of a labyrinth if you can see the goal from the start, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

I flopped onto the one couch we made, and rubbed my belly, which was getting really gigantic by this point. “It’ll be nice to have a real lair again. I hope we don’t get chased out of here too quickly.”

“Long enough for you to lay your dragon eggs, at least,” he said. “When are they due?”

I grimaced. “At least a week ago – they were already overdue when Luna came to visit. I hope I actually lay them at some point, and don’t just pop like a balloon.”

He tilted his head. “What do your biometrics say?”

I shook my head. “You know it’s never precise about egg laying. It says…” I paused to check. “Uh, it estimates negative two days. That’s, um.”

“I’ll go talk to the diamond dogs,” he said. “Maybe they have a doctor.”

“It’s probably a witch doctor,” I said, grimacing.

He rolled his eye-spots. “Maybe they have a real doctor. I’ll ask.”

They sent the old bitch. She squinted her good eye at the lounge we’d built on the top floor. “You are finished with your task already?”

“No, we’ve still got more to dig through,” I said. “We wanted to stop smelling it though, so we bricked it over. With plastic, not bricks. Plasticked it over. Do you want a tour? You’re short enough to fit.”

She shook her head. “I come to examine you. Fire says you worry about your pups.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed that she was the only one he could find.

She scowled at my expression.

But oh well. I explained, “They’re half-dragon, and the pregnancy has been weird. I should have laid the eggs by now.”

She leaned close, and sniffed at my belly. “How many eggs?”

“Two,” I said.

She poked me with her staff. “Careful!” She scowled at my outcry, and poked me a bit harder.

Finally, she nodded. “They are ready, but dragon eggs are gluttons for magic and heat. You are not a dragon, so I use magic.” Her scarred, ruined eyelid opened, and where her other eye should have been was a glowing green gem, embedded in the socket. It flared brightly, and she placed her clawed paw on my belly, and the rush of green light spread rapidly down her arm and –

I was forcibly drawn into my mindscape, the little dragon representing my warp crystal perched on my head and hissing as the rock I stood on liquified and I started to sink beneath the surface – knees, hips… it dug its claws into my scalp and tried to drag me back out.

“No! Stop!” I said, to her or to it, I wasn’t sure. Neither of them listened. I fished the warp crystal’s amulet out from beneath my chest plate, and as my head started to swim from the agony of two imaginary forces fighting over me, I tossed it onto the couch. I briefly imagined vanishing beneath the ground, and then everything was agony, spreading from my belly and crotch. Burning heat, stretching pain, tearing flesh… I screamed, arching my back and contorting all out of shape, claws digging into the plastic floor tiles…

“What’s going on? What did you do?” That was Star? “Stop it! Stop hurting her or I’ll make you stop!”

There was a last burst of pain, and then a flood of pleasure as the tail end of the egg tapered to a more reasonable size, and the slick, bloody dragon egg rolled across the floor. I wailed, sore not only in my poor, abused vagina but in my three non-mechanical limbs.

“She’s bleeding!” Star said, panicked.

“That’s one,” the old bitch said, and the green fire built up on her hand once more…

The second egg was worse, bad enough that I shrieked my throat raw and lost the ability to breathe. It didn’t take as long, at least, with the way already stretched beyond its limits by the first.

“Is it over?” I said. My throat was so hoarse that even my faceplate’s vocal synthesizer made it sound like a croak.

I felt so weak.

“Almost,” the old bitch sighed. “There is too much blood.”

“Can you stop it?” Star asked.

She shook her head. “It is too late. She bleeds out.”

I tried to move, but it was so cold, and I couldn’t feel my limbs. “This means I lose a point for killing myself, doesn’t it,” I said, as everything started to get fuzzy. “Only one though, right?” I tried to look at Star, but I couldn’t move anything. The only reason I could talk was because it was synthesized.

Star nodded. “Only one.”

It took Fire and Star working together almost a week to revive me. Neither of them had any medical training, but we had all the necessary instruction manuals on file and it wasn’t like they could kill me more by screwing up. They did make a huge mess by pumping me full of replacement blood without patching the torn artery, but that was more of a funny story to laugh about later than anything truly dangerous.

“And the good news is, we have all the medical components built now, so if someone else gets hurt maybe we can save them before they die all the way,” Star said.

“Are the eggs okay?” I asked.

Star shrugged. “They’re in a nest, with egg caps on. No sign of brain activity yet though. They’re definitely not kobolds so I don’t know if that’s something to worry about. Most natural species take longer to set up their neural net.”

I reached for my chest, which was bare – they’d given me a faceplate just after waking, but the rest of my rig was elsewhere. “And the warp crystal?”

“I have it,” Fire said. “The old bitch tried to steal it but it burned her hand.”

“She was clever,” Star said, “Waited until I was distracted. The hissing noise got my attention though.”

“Fucking witch doctors,” I groaned. I still felt pretty weak, which my extensive experience with coming back from the dead said was normal (it had happened once before, when I broke my leg – same deal, fatal blood loss).

Aside from getting at least another day of rest, Star’s non-expert opinion was that I should probably stick to virtual sex for the foreseeable future (I’d eventually heal all the way, but they had no idea how long it would take) and should definitely not get pregnant. Also, next time any of us had gigantic eggs twice the size of the ones that we were supposed to lay, we should just disembowel ourselves and get them out that way, because it was safer. I laughed at that, but they showed me the medical procedure in the reference manuals that explained how to do it safely.

There was also a reasonable chance that I’d damaged more stuff internally that wasn’t life threatening but would keep me from ever having kids again, but I’d already laid twenty six eggs so I decided that getting depressed over that was kind of stupid.

At any rate, once Star and Fire confirmed that I was alive again for real and not likely to die until I did something else stupid, they let the kids run in and cry and wail and climb all over me – apparently they really loved me or something and were terrified that I might not be coming back.

It was kind of nice, and I tried to hug them back, although I was completely overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Fire pried one of them off of my neck. “Nine, stop trying to strangle her.”

“Did you number our children?” I asked.

“Um…” Star said, “We visited them at school to see what they were calling themselves, and apparently they just had GUIDs because they’re not allowed to change their own names yet and we were supposed to give them egg names but didn’t.”

I blinked “We were?”

Star threw up their hands. “I know! I’d never heard of it either! I always thought they were randomly assigned.”

“I shortened them to a digit or two each to make them easier to remember,” Fire said.

He pointed to each of them in turn and rattled off their ‘names’. Apparently, our children were named Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Seven, Eight, Nine, Nineteen, Sixty Two, Sixty Three, Ninety, Ay, Cee, Ceecee, Dee, Eff, and Effeff. I really hoped they didn’t keep those names when it came time to pick their icons.

They were different colors and coat patterns and I’m sure they even had different personalities, but I couldn’t keep them straight which I’m pretty sure made me a terrible parent.

“Should we give egg names to the dragon eggs now?” I asked.

Star sighed. “We can’t, not until they have enough of a brain for the system to lock onto. Their user accounts don’t exist yet.” They smiled. “Why, did you have something in mind?”

I grimaced. “I was thinking ‘Pain’ and ‘Suffering’.” Fire and Star gave me a look. “What? If they’re anything like Ash they’ll love names like that.”

Once I could walk, I walked over to talk to the old bitch. She was talking to a couple of diamond dogs about reinforcing something or other that I didn’t care about, so I interrupted them.

“You tried to steal my warp crystal,” I said.

The three of them looked down at me. “If you are dead, you don’t need it anymore,” she said. “Why are you alive?”

“Fire and Star revived me,” I said. “For future reference, don’t try to take the warp crystal away from our lair. It makes our machines go.” This was an oversimplification – it made the generators work, which charged the batteries, but we had backup generators that could burn organics.

“And your machines bring back the dead?” one of the diamond dogs asked.

“Well…” I mean, I wanted to say ‘no’ but the more complicated version might actually save someone’s life, so, “They can if they haven’t decayed. Kobolds don’t decay. Most other creatures do. Typically you’ve got about an hour at the most if you keep them cold…

“I can prevent decay,” the old bitch said. “It is within my aspect.”

“Then we could try? But we don’t have a doctor. It took both my friends a week to put me back together because neither of them is a doctor. I don’t know how often diamond dogs die but even a small throughput could completely prevent us from getting anything else done. Do you have any…” not real, don’t say ‘real’ “…conventional doctors who know how to patch wounds and things? That’s the hard part. For us. Not being doctors.”

“I hear ‘yes but no’,” the old bitch said after thinking over it.

I tried to use smaller words. “If you preserve a body right after death, and fix its wounds so that it’s healthy except for being dead, then we have a machine that can bring it back to life. If the second part is hard for you…” wait. I’d come here to be angry and now I was offering to help them?

Eh. Revenge was pointless next to making ourselves too useful to get rid of. “We have headsets that train our children really fast. They might work on diamond dogs. If you send us a volunteer or two we can have them try it out? And even if they don’t let the dogs learn fast they’re still a lot of fun to play with at normal speed.”

She looked suspicious. “And what do you get in return?”

I counted off on my fingers. “You don’t take our stuff without asking. You protect us from things that want to hurt us. You help us dig our lair bigger if we need more space because wow you guys are great at digging. Um… we might need some more gold or copper for circuitry if we have to build a *lot* of headsets. We can stretch one bit to about a dozen of them.”

She stared. “Is that all.”

I pondered. “You let us set up traps in the hallway? I mean we’re going to do that anyway. Oh! And you don’t try to weasel out of your end of the deal by cleverly failing to mention something important like ‘the cave we have for you is full of garbage’ because that was totally an insult, even if we’re equipped to make the most of it. We’re easygoing but we’re not *that* naïve.”

“You ask for a lot,” she said.

“Half of it is just ‘don’t fuck us’,” I said. “I mean, without asking first.”

She wouldn’t actually commit to a deal, but she did send Rover and Perro to test the headsets, since they were already friendly with us and if we were going to betray and murder them we’d be killing our own potential allies. She didn’t say that. Fire said that. I think she probably just asked for volunteers and they volunteered because they were already friendly with us.

It worked a lot better for them than it had for the parrots – at ten times speed they felt sluggish and drugged and a little stupid, but slowing it down to eight times speed worked pretty well.

“Does this work on our pups?” Perro asked. “They grow up too fast to learn everything we want to teach them, so only the chaos keepers learn everything and the other races that grow up more slowly think we’re stupid.”

“It’s *meant* for pups,” Star said. “Send us all your puppies!”

They had a lot of puppies, but Perro and Rover were able to dig out floor three so there was enough room for them, and the dogs already had nursemaids who could take care of them while they were awake. They dug the floor three extension two levels high so it also included floor two, since the nursemaids wanted to be able to stand up, but that was fine because floor two was mainly just going to be for eggs and we only had two eggs incubating for the foreseeable future.

They didn’t ask the old bitch for permission – maybe she wasn’t actually in charge? Perro and Rover confirmed that they did whatever she asked, though, because she was the chaos-keeper and knew everything.

“If we weren’t outnumbered by diamond dogs in our own home now, I’d feel safe having all their puppies as hostages,” Fire said.

“We could always put nets in the ceiling to tie up all the caretakes by remote control,” I suggested, half-joking.

“Oh, I already did that,” Fire said. “But the aim on those isn’t very reliable.”

Eventually, we got around to sucking up more garbage – with the hose, through the gel membrane; we had enough metal already harvested to last for a while and even Star wasn’t that eager to jump back into the filth now that we had a clean place to rest and enough resources to last for a while, and only a vague duty to someone that we didn’t really like motivating us to continue.

I was nervously checking the fireproof kobold eggs for signs of brain activity for the second time that day, and Fire was working on an easy training labyrinth to run the puppies and our own kids (and any visiting diamond dogs) through, when Star, who was siphoning up garbage looking for copper or gold because we really were running low, suddenly broadcast ‘TRASH MONSTER!’ to everyone in range, which included both of us, the diamond dog caretakers, Rover, and sixty children of various species. The followup picture showing their faceplate half-submerged in slime with a tentacle smearing more filth over the other half made the urgency of the cry crystal clear.

It was less clear what we were supposed to *do* about it.

“That’s an Otyugh!” Rover shouted, verbally, which worked fine because everyone in broadcast range was also in earshot. “What’s an Otyugh?” I shouted back, looking around for something to use as a weapon as I ran down the stairs. I hadn’t thought to grab my old parrot weapon during the mad evacuation, and I didn’t think the net guns and glue bombs we usually used would help much against a monster that lived in trash. I didn’t see anything likely until I got all the way down to six, where I grabbed a long sharp rusty pole and hoped I wouldn’t cut up my hands worse than whatever I tried to stab with it.

Rover was already there, pulling Star up through the gel membrane. One of the tentacles was wrapped around them, but it let go and slithered back into the trash when I poked it with the ‘spear’. The hose was still stretched taut through the membrane, vibrating and jerking around as something tugged on its far end, hidden in the garbage pile.

“It thought the hose was attacking it!” Star said. “It only grabbed me by accident, I think.”

The kids standing around were mostly complaining and making icky faces from the stench of the slime covering Star from head to tail. I prodded Star with my stick until they got the hint and ran over to the cleansing spray we’d only intended to use on salvaged bits of metal. It was safe for kobolds though.

“It’s still hooked!” Rover said, grabbing onto the hose. “Help me pull it up!”

Some of the older puppies ran up behind him and helped pull on the hose, dragging it slowly back up through the hatch. A tentacle lashed out and curled around the hose, just missing Rover’s paws… I ran towards it and stabbed it with the pole, but that just made it angrier.

A message appeared on everyone’s display -- “KILL SUCKY SNAKE KILL KILL SNAKE KILL”.

“Turn it off!” Star suggested.

“We can’t let an Otyugh loose in the tunnels!” Rover insisted, continuing his tug of war. “They don’t just eat garbage!”

There was a horrible ‘bang!’, and the hose, stretched past its limits, snapped. Rover and the children went flying, while the severed hose flailed around threatening to suck up puppies and kobolds alike into its all-consuming void! I parried it with my spear and pinned it against the wall, searching through the menus for the remote hose control because the nozzle with the manual controls we usually used was gone and it really did need to be turned off right now.

Before I could manage what should have been a trivial task, the Otyugh, a shit-dripping armor-encrusted tentacled horror with a giant toothy maw for a face erupted through the hatch, roaring incoherently, flailing aimlessly, and apparently transmitting “EAT YOU SNAKE PEOPLE” at us.

I panicked and asked the warp crystal to Crush it, hoping to at least hold it in place with the increased inertia – but that made the flailing tentacles into unstoppable sledgehammers of destruction, smashing huge holes in the plastic floor and threatening to send the whole level collapsing into the shit-heap. After that one swing they were done, though – the Otyugh wasn’t strong enough to move them against the crushing force… but the “EAT YOU EAT YOU EAT YOU” let us know that it wasn’t out of the fight yet, and I really didn’t want to hold it with the warp crystal until it died because teaching warp crystals to kill is not a good idea.

Also, it was slowly managing to turn itself in my direction, which meant that it *was* strong enough to move against all the inertia my baby warp crystal could heap on it, and it knew exactly where it was coming from, somehow. The toothy maw approached with what would have been comical slowness if I hadn’t been locked in place by the need to keep the hose pinned and the Crush going.

Then Fire ran in, finally, carrying an awkwardly bulky cylinder which he pointed at the monster – it was part of a trap! A spear shot out towards the otyugh, the serrated grabbing claw of a ‘friendly’ spear springing out to clamp onto it around its midsection. “Well that was useless,” I started to think to myself, before Fire triggered the trap again, and the ‘friendly’ claw clamped shut with a sickening squelch, crushing the otyugh’s armor plate and messily snipping it in half.

Both halves sat there, twitching, until I remembered to release the Crush, letting the back half slide back into the garbage pile, while the front half sagged, limp.

I imagined petting the little dragon in my mindscape, to reward the warp crystal for saving my life, but it had something in its teeth. I didn’t get a good look at it before it furtively swallowed. “What was that?” I imagined asking it, but it was just a baby dragon and I couldn’t imagine it answering, even if it had wanted to.

I looked up to notice Star and Fire arguing. “You were going to use that on our kids?!”

“It was just a prototype I was playing with!” Fire shouted back. “I wasn’t going to leave that mode turned on!”

I finally navigated the menus to shut off the broken hose, then crept forwards to look down into the pit. The otyugh half was gone. “Guys, everybody, we need to get out of here,” I said. “I don’t think that was the only garbage monster.”

Whatever else was down there, it didn’t come after us before we got everyone up to the next level and closed the emergency hatch.

The good news was that nobody died.

Rover and the puppies who’d been playing tug of war were all hurt pretty badly by diamond dog standards – broken bones, bruises, several had a concussion. Without a doctor we weren’t going to be fixing them with cybernetics, but there were some first-aid instructions intended for use by non-doctors that let us get them wrapped up and bandaged so they weren’t in any danger and would eventually heal on their own.

Star was actually in worse shape – they’d been scratched across their back by the toothy protrusions on the otyugh’s tentacle, and between the otyugh slobber and the septic garbage the scratches had gotten thoroughly infected even with the relatively quick attempt to wash them out. We gave them a bunch of antibiotics (there was a recommended mix that were safe to use together) but they still got sick, which could mean that the bacteria here were immune but more likely meant that some of the infection was from parasites or viruses and those were harder to treat blindly.

The bad news was that we had garbage monsters, and if they were intelligent enough to send us text messages they might be intelligent enough to figure out doors. This news was bad enough that the diamond dogs’ leader showed up at our lair, flanked by Perro and a bunch of heavily armed and armored guards. We could tell they were the leader because even the injured diamond dogs knelt before them and bared their throats, and also they were wearing a crown.

“What is this!” they growled. “Who are you!”

“We’re kobolds,” Fire replied in a calm, even tone. “The old bitch said we could live here if we cleaned up the old garbage pit.”

I crept up behind him – I’d been down on the next level checking on the fireproof kobold eggs again – and tried to keep my mouth shut.

“But you fail!” the leader growled. “And now our puppies are injured, and you need us to finish the job you fail at!”

“I wouldn’t say we need your help,” Fire replied. “We would have tried a few more things before even thinking about giving up… but if you’re offering to help kill the monsters I’m not going to stop you.”

“But now we are doing your job,” the leader replied. “What will you pay us instead?”

“Gems?” I suggested.

“We have gems,” they snorted.

I nodded slowly, and added, “We’re teaching your children. They’ll learn four times as fast as they could without our help, so your next generation –"

“You already do that,” they said. “And now our puppies are wailing in pain.”

“Well, I don’t know, what do you want?” I asked. “You must want something since you’re going out of your way to reject everything we offer. Do you want me to get down and suck your dick? Zero out of two royal assholes took me up on that one, but I guess it’s worth a shot.”

“You can’t count Luna twice,” Fire sent me. I sent back an image of a face sticking out its tongue.

“Ha,” they said, taking it in stride. “You have no mouth.”

I cracked my faceplate open, and stuck out my tongue, slowly licking it over the jaggy fang-like protrusions the faceplate liked to leave. Then snapped it shut, and folded my arms, smirking.

They snorted, and shrugged. “I accept. Perro, you take her to my chambers. You make her ready. I come to claim her after I exterminate these pests.”

Perro motioned to me, and I hesitantly walked over to join them, as the hulking diamond dog warriors streamed past in the other direction. I stopped as I reached them, and turned back to the leader. “Just to be clear, by ‘pests’ you mean –”

“I mean the garbage monsters, yes,” they growled. “You are not as annoying as you think.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” Fire sent.

“Our Alpha has powerful appetites,” Perro replied, apparently included. “I hope you can handle him.”

“He can’t be worse than the dragon,” I sent back to both of them, as Perro led me down the hall. “Wait!” I said out loud, and stopped. “Wait here,” I told Perro, and ran back to the lair to print up an extra-large headset, which only took a minute or so, then ran back to join them. They were back with Fire in the lounge, talking about something in low tones. “Virtual sex is a lot safer. I’ll see if I can get him to try it,” I told them.

They looked at each other, and Perro shrugged.

“Good luck,” Fire said, and I headed off to my date.