ETS WIP Chapter 15: The Battle of Tech Support
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"Priest Aeth," Sir Lance Corporal said from his position flying above the servers in the grand open space, "you go to server 19-D. Acolyte Lyta, proceed to server 3-J."
Lyta didn't object, even if she didn't necessarily feel like an acolyte. She wasn't so sure about this god, she never was one for specific worship practice. But she believed in Aeth. She believed in Aeth unconditionally, and that could extend some faith to this god.
Aeth found their server and immediately called up the command screen and started looking for all of their logs. Buried in their somewhere must be the connection to the computer in the Abyss.
Lyta, at her server, was busy trying to build a firewall to specifically target the stupid Swwarm app. It was going to take her a while because Lyta was not the best coder, that was Aeth, but Aeth was the one with the permissions to cut off their connection to the Abyss itself, so this was how it had to be.
Occasionally from overhead Sir Lance Corporal would dictate a specific line of code or monitor some kind of error as it flew across the sky of the servers.
Normally Lyta would be annoyed but this was not the time to be annoyed at someone backseat coding.
"I found it!" Aeth cried out excitedly. "It's going to take some time to find all the connections and cut them, but the hard part is over."
"Uh... Aeth? They know, and they're mad," Lyta yelled out.
"No, we still have some time before they find us."
"We really don't," Lyta said as she stepped around the corner to look directly at Aeth.
Their first reaction was stunned at Lyta's beauty. She was surrounded by a snowstorm all her own, and dressed head-to-toe in an Old World battle outfit made of frozen ash and fractal wildfires. The patterns were symmetrical and beautiful and Lyta wore it beautifully.
"I have never manifested anything besides a weapon and now I have a spear and shield and body armor," Lyta said nervously. "The Abyss knows and is madder than anything I've ever seen."
"Work faster," Sir Lance Corporal boomed from across the top of the servers. "We have several minutes before the first of the Abyss arrives and we should make the most of that time."
Aeth had to tear their gaze away from Lyta in full battle regalia and back to their keyboard. They had to shut down as many of the connections as possible.
Lyta was doing her best with the firewall but it wasn't going very well. It would almost be easier to remove the app individually from specific people. People who could help.
Now that was an idea.
Lyta quickly pulled up the masterlist of the tech support employees and keyed in two specific people.
"SIR!" she yelled. "I need you to find access codes to the phones for tech support employee 245845! And employee 984611!"
"Lyta! What are you doing?" Aeth yelled out as Sir zoomed over head accessing data and feeding Lyta the numbers.
"Calling the cavalry! Hopefully!"
Lyta hacked her way into the remote access for those two employees phones and with a quick cast of the Installation Wizard spell, she removed the Swwarm app.
However, it wasn't without a cost. Removing the app from those two employees triggered the attack from the worms of the Abyss.
The incursion began and tripped the failsafes in the tech support servers, cutting Lyta's access off as the worms tried to force their way out of the wires and codes and into reality.
"I'm locked out!" Lyta said. She readied her spear and shield and hoped they would be enough.
"Did it work?" Aeth yelled back.
"I hope so!"
"They are here!" interrupted Sir Lance Corporal.
The doors to the grand and sacred field of tech support servers opened as the dozens of infected employees rushed in to stop the two and their god from doing exactly what they were doing.
"I need more time!" Aeth called out.
Lyta rushed over to face the incoming swarm of her coworkers, determined to give Aeth the time they needed.
Instead of an all out assault, Lyta faced her coworkers taking out their phones. The Swwarm app already open and piles of sickly purple worms started to pour out of them. They had opened dozens of doors into the Abyss and called in the parasites from the other dimension.
"Fuck," Lyta swore.
"Defend the priest, fight the mortals. I will fight the worms," Sir Lance Corporal said over Lyta as the god charged the growing and writing piles of abyssal parasites.
Lyta nodded, feeling the deep rage of the abyss, her own anger at this whole situation, and channeled that magic back into herself to give her the power and knowledge to fight with these weapons she never really used before.
Luckily for her, her coworkers didn't bring weapons or anything terribly dangerous. They instead wanted to overwhelm her with pure numbers.
It was something that could very easily destroy Lyta, if she let it. But the other option was to let them through to Aeth who was typing furiously. That was utterly unacceptable.
Instead, Lyta summoned all the cold and the fury she could and froze the ground solid.
The swarming, infected, people of tech support came unprepared and started to slip and slide on the ice. Lyta's magic gave her the advantage her and she was going to exploit it.
She rushed into the small horde and tried her best to injure and subdue her friends and fellow techs.
Overhead Sir Lance Corporal was battling a horde of worms, parasites from a plane of chaos and unless hunger. But it seemed that more kept coming and the small god couldn't stop the tide.
Eventually all the small worms gave way to one big manifestation of the Abyss.
Xilgliv, the Unending Hunger, Worm God of the Abyss, had presented a fraction of itself in the sever basement of tech support to fight Sir Lance Corporal, Small God of an undetermined belief system.
The large worm reared up and turn it's empty, sucking head towards Sir Lance Corporal. "I WILL CONSUME YOU ENTIRELY"
Sir Lance Corporal said nothing, but dove in to fight the Worm God, to defend Aeth, Lyta, and all the others that had been taken over by the Abyss.
Lyta was doing her best to knock out the people attacking her, but they seemed relentless.
She smashed her shield into the chest of someone she vaguely recognized from the ninth floor and heard a crack. For a split second she feared that she had shattered some ribs but when the person blinked and their eyes cleared, Lyta realized that she had hit their phone in their pocket.
"Of course," she said mostly to herself.
But in that second of distraction and clarity, Lyta found herself surrounded.
Even if they had no weapons, the fists and kicks and blows that the infected used against her still hurt.
She was surrounded and her spear was ineffective.
Without really thinking about it, she summoned instead a small hooked blade.
Lyta tried to use it to target as many phones as she could see, but the forces were overwhelming her. Even the boundless rage that was all around her, Lyta's magic was starting to collapse.
Sir Lance Corporal and Xilgliv battled overheard, the battle of gods happening in and beyond this reality.
With every phone Lyta destroyed and every connection to the Abyss that Aeth closed, the Worm God got less and less.
It wasn't fast enough though.
Aeth was trying so hard to not focus on anything besides their work, besides the code in front of them and their task at hand. Bu the sounds all around them, the battle that was clearly happening, the sounds of their god and their friend being attacked and hurt was a lot for them to try and block out.
But they knew that if they didn't, if they stopped or got distracted or missed something than everything was going to be destroyed by the Abyss.
A sudden bright light illuminated the already bright space of the servers.
A large hand reached out and pulled Lyta free from being surrounded.
"What is happening here?" asked a low, rumbling voice.
"Oh thank fuck," Lyta said, through heavy breathing. "You're here."
The Knight of Doors nodded. "Explain."
Lyta pointed up at the battle between gods. "Abyss is attacking. They're infected. Stop them, break phones. Protect Aeth at all costs."
The large Child of the Earth nodded. They didn't question Lyta any further, it was clear that they grasped the situation pretty quickly.
"You really know how to pick interesting situations," said the other person that had come in with the Knight of Doors.
"Ji," Lyta said with only a little disdain. "Glad you can make it."
"I'm not sure what you did or how you're involved, but I guess I owe you for freeing me from it," the whip thin, rapier of a woman said as the green chains started glow from the tattoos covering her arms.
"I'll explain it later, can you just help out now without causing a thing?" Lyta asked snidely.
Ji frowned and finished summoning the chains. "I fucking hate fighting worms."
Lyta and the two Exterminators rushed into the still swarming mass of infected techs.
With the odds ever so slightly evened out, the fight went much easier.
The Knight of Doors was a force to be reckoned with, and was all but unstoppable even with sheer force of numbers.
Ji was a powerful Exterminator in her own right, using spectral chains and her own specific magic to control and manipulate the swarming masses.
The three of them managed to subdue a decent amount of the techs and smashed their phones, cutting off the summoning of the Abyss, one broken piece of technology at a time.
Aeth had closed off almost all of the connections they could find to the old computer. There were only a few left behind that they could find, but there was a synthetic scream of pain from Sir Lance Corporal as the Worm God Xilgliv pressed into the small god, starting to fulfill it's promise of consuming the being entirely.
With her friends and allies doing all they could, it was time for Aeth to do the one thing they had left to do.
The Installation Wizard spell, on it's surface, seemed to be a very simple spell. It added or removed a single program or piece of technology via magic.
But the truth was that the spell was deep magic, it was powerful, and it had infinite capabilities.
Aeth took a step back from the server they were working at and started to cast the spell.
They were going to need to upscale the power, the gestures, the code of the spell, and the amount of magic they were going to have to pour into it.
They pushed out with every spare piece of magic they had and then whatever reserves their consciousness held on to.
With the very precise and specific movements and gestures, the pale green code was left on the air in front of Aeth as they traced the patterns with their hands and their rings glowed as the magic began and spread out in front of them.
Finally, the spell was cast.
Sir Lance Corporal disappeared.
The Worm God did a horrible imitation of a laugh. It was wet and dark and disgusting and it sent a deep cold stab into the guts of everyone who hear it.
A moment later the servers all hummed in unison, the prayer chant rising and getting stronger.
The small god of Sir Lance Corporal returned in a brilliant flash. His stained glass wings glowed brilliantly and the circuit body looked unharmed and undamaged by the fight.
Aeth smiled.
"This is my sanctuary," the formerly small god said in a voice that echoed with the voices of the servers. "You will be gone from this place and you will leave my people alone."
The Worm God tried once more to attack, but this time it crashed like a wave against the rocky cliffs. The servers clicked and roared as Sir Lance Corporal turned off connections to the Abyss, and forcibly removed the app from all the phones connected to tech support.
Xilgliv tried once more to attack, to remain relevant and in this reality that they were not allowed in, but against Sir Lance Corporal they were hopeless.
With a rush and a roar, the Abyss was banished.
Lyta turned to Aeth, her armor starting to finally melt away. "What did you do?"
"I'd like you to meet the newly installed god of tech support," Aeth said with a gesture to Sir Lance Corporal.
i have a kofi where you can read the last chapter early
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it is time
liveblog for A PERILOUS JOURNEY!!! WOOOO YEAH LET'S GOOO!
spoilers below obviously!
THE WETHERALL FARM!!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!!
"we're family" okay so i'm crying
LMFAO HE BLAMED DR GARRSON
THAT'S SO FUNNY. WE WERE JOKING ABOUT CURTAIN PUTTING HER IN A CELL FOR INSUBORDINATION BUT HE LITERALLY THREW HER TO THE WOLVES WOW JKFJDSAKFHDASLFKJ
that poor woman jesus christ
NOO NUMBER TWO LOST THE SAWING COMPETITION RIP (also we were right! it was when they were traveling together!)
"the scavenger hunt is just as much for mr benedict as it is for hte kids" OOHHHHH BLORBO 😭 he's IRRITABLE 😭 poor darling
wait so they got kidnapped by those people in the crowd? were they ten men??
milligan dad content i need it like it air
HE WHITTLED A TOOL FOR KATE— BUT KATE SAYS NO— WTF KATE DON'T REJECT MILLIGAN'S MULTITOOL!!! HE MADE IT WITH LOVE!!!!
miss perumal mom content i also need it like air
it's interesting that curtain didn't tell them about the kidnapping. i suppose if he's not trying to obtain information about duskwort he'd have no reason for the others to know about the kidnapping.
OOOOH THE LIBRARY IN MR B'S HOUSE! idk why i never thought of him having a designated library space because the books just describe him having shelves and piles of books all over the house, but that is BEAUTIFUL god i yearn for his house
constance refusing to acknowledge she loves mr benedict breaks my heart like......"i allow him to believe he is a good at chess, he brings me nutritious food" YOU KNOW WHAT DADS DO? FEED YOU! AND CARE ABOUT HEALTHY MEALS! FUCK! CONSTANCE HE'S YOUR DAD!
"MY COLLECTION SKEWS HEAVILY TOWARDS HISTORICAL THRILLERS" I LOVE HIM
"he knew you'd know" okay crying again
rhonda IMMEDIATELY knows what the fuck is up like she literally waits 3 seconds and then she's like yup they snuck out alkdfjalskdfsdf
THE FUCKING DANCE NUMBER. THE FUCKING DANCE NUMBER. I WILL NEVER RECOVER I WILL NEVER HEAL FROM THE EMOTIONAL DAMAGE THIS CAUSED ME HE'S SUCH A LOSER I CAN'T TAKE THIS
"they believed us" .......oh 🥺
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