Side Story: The grey watch the second wave

“Don’t look so smug,” Valax sighed as they walked, Quilith looking at him from the side.

“Is that any way to talk to your boss?”

“Until you get used to your new promotion, yes. Just because the council finally decided to put their full weight behind your proposal, doesn’t mean nothing is going to go wrong.”

“Something always goes wrong but this was a hard-won victory, the fact it took so much work to get their full support despite massive public approval is ridiculous but now we have the proper funds to try and get out of this dying reality.”

It had been an uphill battle the entire way and Quilith couldn’t exactly blame them, even if he disagreed. With their race’s two options being to either escape the confines of their reality or else accept the slow death of their world as the planet slowly ran out of energy, it felt like an obvious choice except for one minor issue. Escaping to another universe meant their physical death in that one.

It wasn’t an easy thing for many to just accept, especially when they were only just becoming comfortable with the idea that they had some sort of undetectable immortal soul, but clinging to that one life wasn’t going to give them any options if they wanted their people to have a future.

And what a future it could be.

Even ignoring the inherent strength it seemed was possible to achieve in the realm they wanted to make their home, it offered something so much more tantalizing than any of that. What it offered was a place without end, the stars within reach in a way their current ones could never be as the speed of the few they could see in the sky only accelerated it, locking them onto their planet as the universe looked like it was less than a million years from ripping itself apart.

No, rather than be trapped in the tail end of the life of their current reality, it was much better to get to enjoy the boundless potential that was held in such a younger one with all of the opportunity that would come from it. No longer would they be stuck looking at other worlds for what curiosity and mysteries they held, if they could only escape then they’d be able to try and find them for themselves.

It would give their people a future on a galactic scale and he’d do whatever he could to grab it with his own hands.

“Sure, sure,” Valax shrugged. “With the minor issue that it still doesn’t look like we’d be able to save everyone. Not like there aren’t people who want to stay behind but it isn’t the majority of our race, there’s still a ton of issues to work through.”

“Yes, and we have people on both sides trying to get through them.”

“Mmh, you really are so pleased about the efforts of your little pet project, you know that?”

“Who isn’t at this point? He’s the one making the most efforts and progress on our behalf. I may not understand the details of the magic but it sounds like he’s confident that his research will bear fruit and I believe him. At the very least, if things come to it it seems like he thinks that everything he’s determined so far will be useful to us if we have to find another world in that reality to ask instead.”

“Ugh, I’d rather not. How is it that a planet on the edge of total annihilation is our best candidate still? I know it’s not exactly easy to search out worlds across entire universes but the fact we haven’t found a better option to live under is nothing but ridiculous.”

On that matter, Quilith could agree with ease. For whatever benefits gods granted their people, with himself unable to deny the personal belief that their only real use was granting blessings and helping to spread the discoveries of their believers to all corners of their worlds, living under them also created challenges and restrictions for mortals as well.

Mortals worshiped their gods and gave them faith, that was something he had no real problem with, but the idea of living under their restrictions was a whole other matter. Across those alien skies were countless worlds filled with intelligent life but barely any had progressed in a way the grey would find meaningful, instead being slowed significantly by the fact that certain things would simply be forbidden in whole cloth, cutting off areas of research in major ways.

Be it demanding certain levels of respect for the dead destroying medical science and leaving low lifespans despite even the existence of their magics or be it demands for ways the lands be treated preventing the development of industry as a whole, even those were progress compared to places where technology had been stopped in its entirety by gods who seemed to enjoy their people being at the stage of hunter-gatherers and nothing more, there were millions of ways a deity could hinder a society’s growth.

And that’s not mentioning the existence of evil gods across that reality either.

Even when they’d think they’d found a semi-decent world to contact as a backup plan in the event the one they were currently allied with fell, when they looked at the surrounding regions of space there was inevitably a deity ruling a world or star or region of space that they’d comfortably call evil in the way they'd act, treating their people worse than slaves or tools and leaving the risk they might expand out further, creating the same demon situation they were currency watching.

No, in the end, their best hope was that the world they knew would win, with their vast pantheon of gods all different enough that no one could force any ridiculous beliefs on the world’s people as a whole, even if that meant they’d need to settle their current problem first, and with that fact clear in both of their minds they went off to see exactly how it would turn out.

---

As the points opened, ushering in the second wave, the grey across their world watched. Some in excitement, some in fear, a few over meals, but for Quilith and his team, they tried to do so analytically.

Of course, even then they were having drinks, treating it as they had the first, despite knowing they couldn’t expect the same outcome. The gates wouldn’t close early again, meaning they could observe what happened from there.

“Death rates for the demons are immediately high across all of the points,” One observed, letting another who was more pessimistic speak up.

“If their death rates aren’t one hundred percent then they aren’t high enough to matter. Every demon that can squeeze through across the galaxy is trying to get over, at this point, it’s just a numbers game.”

“A numbers game where the winning side is already handicapping themselves,” A different one added. “Do you think there’s actually a limit that’s keeping the demons from sending more over? If there is then maybe that’s something that could be exploited, determine what it is and then increase it.”

“It could just as easily be another stupid whim from another stupid god,” Valax complained. “Maybe whichever ones do this consider themselves to be the sporting sort, giving weaker players a chance by leveling the playing field. It makes as much sense as anything else we’ve seen across this universe.”

They all continued to back and forth it a bit from there but the fundamental issue was despite everything, they just didn’t know. With programs analyzing what they were seeing to look for trends too to help shape their assumptions, they kept coming up with nothing beyond weak guesses that didn’t help in the end.

It left them with the weakest of options to fall back on. Hope.

Despite some mixed feelings, the grey wanted that world to win in the end, not just because it housed the few of their kind they knew could carry on their own people’s legacy but also due to their involvement with that planet.

The grey preferred to watch in most cases. Sure, they allowed for some childish pranks to take place, as much an experiment to see how the residents of foreign worlds would react as anything else, but this was the first they'd let themselves get deeply involved with. Beyond their casual viewings, studies, and interference of the past, they had become invested in that world’s people despite themselves, wanting to see them win in the end.

It was a sentiment that had gripped their globe, watching a planet whose fate felt even more sealed than their own but through it all what they could truly offer was limited.

They could give knowledge and suggestions, they could recommend tests to be carried out to expand on those things too, and they could even spy in the demon worlds that seemed godless, but they couldn’t do anything to offer the single thing they’d mastered, the science of their reality locked behind the walls of its physics no matter how powerful it might have been.

Just thinking about it was depressing in a way that only the loss of their star had been until then and Quilith gave himself the mercy of tuning out the discussions for a span, instead tuning in to focus on his pet project as Ben carried out his own part in it all.

He could see the number of his people watching had only grown since the last time and he couldn’t deny feeling just a bit of hope that the boy would once more show something exciting enough to justify the belief that that world might have a chance.

Author's note

Sorry again for the delay, the next poll will be up in a couple hours