Thresholder, ch 172, The Eight Worlds of Queenie, pt 1

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Turns out that I'm still sick. No idea what the body is doing right now, but I had a fever last night for some stupid reason and my joints were all aching. My guess is that I might have parlayed influenza into a respiratory infection.

I've been sort of idly working on some other projects too, which is maybe not helping Thresholder have regular chapter releases, though I don't know, I also think I'm mostly just sick.

You can read Untitled Villainess Otome here, though until future notice it's just idle, purposeless writing for fun and personal enrichment.

~~~~

I was a princess, first of my father’s children, mudborn, and far worse off for it.

Well, I suppose they don’t have mudborn on Earth? I haven’t come across them anywhere. Might just be my own world then, though it’s not so unusual. Seems they do things differently, but not so differently.

Alright, fine, what a mudborn is … basically, the king goes to one of the mud swamps, which has been tilled up and cleared of plants for his arrival, and he takes his clothes off, gets himself hard, and drills down deep before releasing his seed. He does this as many times a day as he can, all through the fertile season. Then three months later, the king’s men come by and root around in the mud, which is more solid by then, and they pull up a sac that’s got the wet and wiggling mudborn in it.

We’re about the same as a five-year-old born the fleshly way, and age about the same after that.

No, it’s only the king that has strong enough seed to make a mudborn.

Look, chubbo, this isn’t goin’ to work if you keep havin’ questions every five seconds. I’m mudborn, that means the king fucked the mud and I was pulled up. I was first of the mudborn, the only girl from the first three days, and that made me the chief princess. The boys were made into soldiers, trained up for it, but me and my sisters from that season were to be brides and concubines and what have you.

Now, I’ve said before that kings are always talkers, haven’t I? Well, my pop was no exception, he was the rule that taught me the general principle. He always said his voice was his best quality, and he used it at every opportunity, always ready with a lesson or a fact, or more often, an argument. And what he wanted from me, more than anything, was that I be proper. He was going to marry me off so I could have some fleshsons and fleshdaughters, a new generation of proper nobles for someone in another kingdom, or if I wasn’t up to snuff, then for one of his dukes or earls or what have you.

Maybe it’s hard to think it now, but for most of my time, I was a good little girl, obedient and polite, just as he’d told me I had to be. I was the product of his seed and his land, I had a duty to my heritage, to my future husband whoever he might be, all that. And I believed. I had been born with a purpose! If I ever did things I wasn’t supposed to do, that was bad, and I would be punished, and the horrible thing is, I’d punish myself. I’d sit there in my room and choke myself because I hadn’t practiced my instruments. My pop would have slapped me silly for the things I did, but he never had to, because I was my own guard, always watching everything that I did, ready to report to myself for more punishment.

I was a jewel from the mud. I learned the things that a woman was supposed to learn, like embroidery and caring for a house, riding a type of animal we had called a horse, and shooting rifles. Rifles were a woman’s weapon, but only if you used them prone, and it was the only time I felt like I had any real power. I felt like shootin’ my father some days, or shootin’ someone, but I never did.

I was to be married off, and while I liked the idea of a man between my legs, I didn’t like the idea of a baby comin’ out, to say nothin’ of the five or six they’d expect of me. Babies, so far as I understood, were like spinnin’ a bullet in a chamber, hopin’ not to get got. It was a rare woman who survived until her womb gave out, or at least it seemed that way. Sometimes a baby would get stuck and take a woman with him. Awful business, babies. But I was told that I wanted them, and so I repeated the words back, ‘yes, wouldn’t it be so lovely’, because I did what I was told.

My pop picked out a prince for me, someone from across the narrow sea, a brute of a man I’d met only once before. He was tall and burly, and ready to fuck me full of babies.

I didn’t want to be fucked full of babies.

Thing was, I never even really understood it, why they wanted fleshborn. The mudborn were just as good, so why couldn’t the big-dicked brooding bastard have fucked a field instead? He was a king, had kingly blood to him, and presumably kingly seed. But I guess it was something about the next generation, too much mud in the veins or something like that. It wasn’t important for them to tell me, I was just there to make the babies and be respectable and do the woman things.

So I set myself up to run off before the wedding. Maybe I was an idiot back then, a girl who didn’t really know the world too well, but I packed my favorite rifle and thought that maybe I could hunt game, take up residence in a cabin somewhere. They didn’t write books about how to get out of bein’ a princess, now did they? I had to figure it all out myself, because if I’d told someone what I was plannin’, they’d have put me in shackles. I was supposed to be my own guard, and when I stopped bein’ my own guard, at least a little bit, I knew that I could never let anyone know that’s what had happened.

And the very night I was set to go, a portal opens up in my room.

So of course I step through. Can’t say I was prepared for what my life was gonna be like.

~~~~

Perry realized as he listened to Queenie talked and watched the images she showed that there was an art to the Inspector’s power, a way in which you needed to weave images with the story you were telling.

He was surprised by just how little art Queenie had, not that he’d have naively expected her to be good at it. Certainly there were things she was talking about that she couldn’t show, because she only knew them secondhand, like the king fucking the mud fields or whatever he was supposed to have done to have mud children. Perry wasn’t sure how seriously to take all that, and Queenie never showed anyone being pulled up from the ground, though she had shown a number of women giving birth, which she’d apparently been present for.

Sometimes Queenie seemed to forget that she was even sharing images, and certainly there were moments when she could have made her point by pulling out a specific memory, a time when her father had talked at length, or a display of the brutishness of her would-be husband.

Perry was reminded of how bad some PowerPoint presentations were, and then when he decided that wasn’t quite apt, he decided that it was more like when a movie has a voiceover that’s telling the audience things the movie should have shown instead.

He did worry somewhat about whether she was hiding things from him, but it was easier to believe that this was just basic incompetence on her part, especially because this was her very first time telling these stories, and her very first time using the Inspector’s power. He wondered whether he should broach the subject of her storytelling choices, but decided against it — she didn’t seem to like interruptions, nor questions about the basic tenets of the world she came from, maybe because she simply never had a chance to learn the answers to the questions he had.

~~~~

I was greeted by giant moths. My eyes didn’t quite know what they were seein’, and I screamed some, then raised my rifle at them, though they didn’t seem to pay me much mind, only circled around me. The plants were bigger than anything I’d ever seen before, towering above me, and I felt lighter but also like I was being squeezed somehow — have you heard about gravity?

Well, I hadn’t. Not much in the way of education for a mudborn princess, and I’m not sure my people knew much about it. But the gravity was different, a third what it is most other places, except the air pressure was also higher, and that first week I felt awful about it, like someone was trying to pump me full of air. Hard thing to shake, really.

By nightfall the moths were swarming around me, not actually beatin’ their wings against me, just … a vortex of moths overhead, and around me. I would take a step, and the moths would move with me, and I couldn’t see because of all the moths.

I had no idea what was going on, I couldn’t sleep for the flapping of wings, and I was getting hungry. I might have been able to hunt, since you know I can pull a trigger, but I didn’t know what there was to hunt, and had never made a fire before.

It would have been nice if I had figured things out on my own, but I got rescued. They were military, from a different world, a third one, but they’d been with the moths for going on ten years. They were cut off from the place they’d come from, and in a bad way, which I didn’t help with too much, because I was another mouth to feed. There were thirty of them, more or less, still with the same command structure, half of what they’d started with.

They said I had a noisy mind — apparently that was what made the moths swarm. They had me drink a syrup that made me feel awful and put me in bed, but it quieted my mind right down. The moths were psychic, as I might have mentioned before, and they didn’t care about humans too much, but they used the psychic pathways of the world. And if there was a human there, the moths got confused, or not confused, since they were just fuzzy dumb animals, but it screwed with their instincts somehow. The moths had been using me as a guiding star, tilting their flight to keep me on their left.

It took two weeks on that miserable syrup for me to learn how to quell my mind, and I was still never very good at it. They had all kinds of questions about who I was and where I’d come from, maybe because they were desperately looking for a way back home. I didn’t have answers for them.

While the moths were pretty harmless, just treating us like lamplight, there were beasts that preyed on the moths, giant creatures that were reminiscent of birds or bats or toads. Those were where most of the deaths came from, though by that point the army men knew more or less how to handle it. They moved pretty regularly, because as quiet as they’d made their minds, it still attracted things.

Syrup aside, I was thrilled. There was no one who knew what I was supposed to be, and the guard in my head, the one that wanted to punish me when I was out of line, she was lost and confused. I was with people from a military, sure, but they had their own strange ways, and there were women among them, hard women who trained with knives and hefted packs. There wasn’t a script for dealin’ with any of it, and that felt wonderful.

I ate crisped up moths and flank steaks from the giant frogs. I slept in hammocks. I got drunk and kissed one of the men, which got him in trouble, because apparently there was a rule that no one was allowed to treat me like that. I got mad about that, except that I was still worried about the babies, so maybe it was for the best.

I picked up skills, got trained in weapons and how to fight, learned the lay of the land, and when six months had passed, the first brute showed up.

He came at me with all his power, out of nowhere, and it was only because I had people with me that I survived any of it. And from there, it was mostly battles, with me running from him as fast as I could and him being a complete dick about things. I had some ammo for my rifle, but not all that much, so it was a matter of trying to get a good angle on him. I unstilled my mind to get the moths around me, cloaking me from him, covering my escape.

The last of the military men died protecting me, and that was stupid of them, I always thought. Who was I to them? Just a girl who was out of her depth, a burden on them. But they had it baked into them that they were defenders of the innocent, that they were big strong people from a big strong country and the little guards in their head were tellin’ them that they had to, even if it cost their own lives, even if they could have left me behind and lived with the moths.

So it was just me, and I moved as fast as I could, trying to use my mind to control the moths, which didn’t work very well.

I found the scarf when I was scrambling away. There were people here before the military men had come in, though they didn’t have much metal. I took the scarf, because it was slithering toward my thoughts like a carp to bait, and I picked up a rusted knife, which was the only thing that looked like a weapon. I had three bullets for my rifle and not much else.

So I set up a sniper’s nest, stilled my mind as best I could, gettin’ all the thoughts to lay flat, and I waited for him to find me.

It was a clean shot, straight through his eye, which might have been the only place that would have killed him, because I sure as shit had hit him a few times before.

And then there was a portal, and I was all alone with dead people all around me, so I went through.

~~~~

The images had come in a jumble. Queenie was bad at narrating over the images, and a few times she just stopped to watch what was happening, even though she must have been there for it all. It was different, seeing something all around you rather than in your mind’s eye, and Perry was sympathetic to that, but it made for a few awkward pauses, and a few times when he really would rather have seen something rather than hear it described.

She didn’t show him the military men until after she’d mentioned them a few times, and when he saw them, they weren’t at all what he’d pictured — much more Roman legion with assault rifles than United States military special operations, though they had the variety of gender and race that Perry would have expected from a hugely expansionist country that valued equality.

The moths had come in all sizes, not just giants, and Perry had seen a few with a shock of red hair, or whatever moths had that made them fuzzy instead of hair. He presumed that it was chitin, but maybe that was a bad assumption given that these moths were on a scale unlike anything that had ever existed on Earth, unless there were giant prehistoric insects. Perry vaguely remembered there being something like that.

Queenie had shown the moment she’d discovered the scarf, so at least she wasn’t lying about that, and while it was possible she was leaving out a conversation or two she’d had with the unnamed thresholder she’d fought, she’d shown enough of the blow-by-blow. It wouldn’t have been weird for her to just be attacked out of nowhere; that was more or less what had happened to Perry.

The biggest thing, when looking at the differences between what she said and what was shown, was how weak and uncertain she seemed. She hadn’t commented on that, but he could see the terror on her face as she reloaded her rifle, the way she fumbled with the lever, hesitation before shooting, all the aspects that didn’t line up with who she now was. He could see why they had felt an instinct to protect her, because for all her skill with a rifle, which she seemed to like showing him, she’d been innocent and naive back then.

The worlds had changed her, obviously, it would be hard to travel the many worlds and not end up a different person for it, but looking through these memories, it was clear how deep the changes went.

~~~~

They took my rifle right away when I got to the next world, but left me the scarf, because they didn’t know what it was. We’d never had much religion in the world I was from, never called it religion, it was just that pop was divinely chosen by god, one of the only men with strong blood and strong seed, and we had chapels and churches, and prayed and all that, but I ‘spect that you’ve seen real religion, the kind that people take more seriously, that guides them and warps them. And that was this world.

I wasn’t so clear then on everything, but they had what you’d call technology, somethin’ that I’m sure you’re familiar with — that armor you wear has the stink of it. They had computers and microphones and screens on things, talkin’ machines that would tell you all kinds of things, but mostly about the Church and how great it was, and the glory of God. They outfitted me with one of those machines, one that would talk to me about their holy book and how I should behave. Everyone had one, whispering in their ear. I said it could think, but it was stupid as could be, and it watched what I was doin’, but didn’t really understand any of it, I don’t think. Hard to say, with a computer.

They set me up with a com at one of their churches, then turned me out with an address and a place to work, which is better than I got in a lot of other worlds. They wanted a twelve hour shift from me, claimed it was godly, and the place they put me was crumblin’ apart and swarmin’ with rats, but still, have to give credit where due.

I did one shift, and that was it. There was a factory producin’ god-knows-what, and it was my job to make sure the things were given a half-turn. There was a chute that was supposed to do it, so I was just backup, standin’ there watchin’ to make sure that the chute did its job. Awful way to spend a day, and I ached by the end of it.

My com told me the whole time that service was godly, that work was godly, all that blow. I hated the com by the time twelve minutes had passed, and I’d have torn it off or silenced it, but there wasn’t a way to shut it down, and I’d have been in trouble if I’d tossed it off, besides which, I needed a place to sleep and meals to eat.

With my tiny slice of free time, I went prowling around. There were markets with guards and their cybernetic eyes, makin’ sure that everyone stayed religious about the whole thing, watchin’ out for anyone tryin’ to yoink somethin’, but also for other sins. You had to be careful what you said, as I found.

If I hadn’t run into one of the pamphleteers, I might have just kept goin’ to work, but I was catnip for them, a young woman who was clearly in a bad way, pretty and with nothin’ to lose. I read through the pamphlet they handed me while a boy my age talked to me, and ten minutes later I was in a safe house with a bunch of other people. I asked questions, and they were the right ones, I s’pose, because a few hours later I was brought to a different safe house, patted down and scanned to make sure I wasn’t riddled with tech. Most people had implants they had to mess up or remove, but I had nothin’ of the sort, and after a twelve hour shift I was ready to burn everythin’ down. I didn’t end up workin’ another day.

I was started small all the same. The pamphleteers gave me things to steal, so I stole them. Felt a real thrill about it, I can tell you that. The little guard in my head was outraged, gaspin’ for air, and I liked how it felt to beat her with a thick stick. The church had all the tech — the eyes of god, the hands of god, angel’s wings, all kinds of things — and the pamphleteers wanted some for themselves. So a lot of what I stole were clip-ons, things that they could go into the guts of and make safe, but also swap around between themselves. There was other stuff that was more dangerous, stuff that went inside the body, because that stuff you couldn’t just ditch in a back alley.

I stole the rifle that way. It was almost too heavy for me to lift back then, but we had a truck. Couldn’t use the thing standin’, that’s for sure, but I was a better shot than any of them except for those with eyes that had been replaced, so they let me keep it. They wanted me to kill people with it, but they didn’t want to say so, and the pamphleteers had layers like an onion, always a deeper level to go down to. They wanted me to be a true believer, which I wasn’t, and I didn’t lie to them about it, because … I don’t know, I just didn’t want to. I wanted to be me.

I did end up their assassin eventually. They were more about pamphlets than anythin’ else, more words than deeds, but I could hit a target from way far off, and when you have a good sniper with a great rifle, it’s hard to say no.

It was a good life, for as long as it lasted. I had a boy grow interested in me, and I pulled a knife on him, tellin’ him that I wasn’t one for babies, so he gave me an education on all the ways there were to have the sweet without the bitter.

I couldn’t tell whether we were makin’ much change, and didn’t much care, if I’m bein’ honest. I might have even gone over to the priests, if they didn’t want me dead, but all their side offered was a prison cell or a noose, and what the pamphleteers offered was a warm bed, a tongue between my legs, and plenty of time to do whatever I wanted.

I got implants, though I don’t have most of them any more. My eyes got better, though not so good as they are now, and I got sturdier, faster, though not as sturdy and fast as now. I could carry the rifle around, and I was shootin’ from so far away that by the time anyone figured out where the shot came from, I’d be gone like a fart in the wind.

The brute showed up claimin’ that he was god, that he’d come to find the devil and tussle. He didn’t say much, didn’t give any big speeches, but that didn’t stop the priests from sayin’ everythin’ for him. They knew about me, though I’d never shown my face when I had the rifle, and they hadn’t had much luck catchin’ me.

The brute had telekinesis and all the upgrades the priests could throw at him. They said he was the Chosen One, and he said that he was god, and it was pretty clear to everyone that he didn’t know shit about shit when it came to their doctrine and their holy books. He wore a com that told him what to say, but mostly he didn’t say it.

The priests had been tryin’ to contain the pamphleteers, but they’d been doin’ it by havin’ their eyes wide open all the time. The brute was more of a ‘tear down buildings until luck wins out’ type. He could take down a whole apartment complex just by squattin’ down and gruntin’ real hard like he was workin’ out a shit, though it usually took him enough time for people to come floodin’ out, which is when the police-priests would cage them up and check them over.

I shot him three days in, square in the head, and I thought I’d killed him, but they had better doctors than I’d thought, and it wasn’t too long before he came back on the scene, half his face replaced by metal and plastics.

The second time I shot him, he caught the bullet in mid-air, twirled it around, then sent it right back at me. It didn’t land anywhere near me, I was nearly a mile off and he didn’t have a hundredth the precision of the rifle, probably didn’t even have eyes on me, but it still put some fear into me.

The third time, we hacked his gear. We’d captured one of the priests and got him to bend to our will, giving us the keys we needed, and that was the problem with havin’ someone on top: it’s always goin’ to be a weak link, if they’re not strong enough. I can’t say much about that priest’s seed or his blood, but his skull was only as strong as a normal man’s, and a bullet went through just fine.

The brute begged and pleaded, but he’d killed a few of my friends, and was pretending to be god, so there wasn’t much choice on my end. The pamphleteers broadcast his dying confession, all the crimes he had to get off his chest before that final breath, and I don’t really know what the outcome of all that was, because I went through the portal with my rifle as quick as it showed up.

~~~~

Perry wondered whether, if he’d known anything about Warhammer 40K, he might have recognized anything in the tech priests. He only knew that it was a term from the setting though, none of the specifics. It wouldn’t have been the first time that something from Earth fiction had been replicated as a world, with Candyland being the stand out, but he just had no way of knowing.

The skyscraper-cathedrals were dazzling and the implants were daunting, but one of the main things that Perry took away from seeing things was that she’d shown herself having sex. It was really gratuitous, not necessary to the story she was trying to tell at all, and more graphic than he would have believed if he’d just been told flatout that she was going to show that to him. He wondered why she would show herself in the midst of coitus, and came up with very little — even if she didn’t care about her privacy in the slightest, it would have been odd. Maybe she’d been trying to throw him off his game, but he couldn’t imagine that she thought that would actually work. He’d seen naked women before, and Queenie wasn’t any biologically different.

The world was more cyberpunk than space opera, and he didn’t even know whether that was actually what Warhammer 40K was. It was theocratic to its core, vaguely Christian with a triangle instead of a cross, but she hadn’t said anything about doctrine, and he found himself not really caring.

One thing she had inadvertently revealed, visible on a monitor and maybe just an alias, was her name: Samantha Hargrove. He didn’t think there was any use to that, but he had no idea.

<And that’s about halfway through,> said Queenie. <Now you give yours.>

<That’s not halfway, you have eight to offer, that’s just three,> said Perry.

<Chubbo can count!> laughed Queenie. <But the others are short, peach’s promise. Some of those brutes I tore through, and didn’t see much of the world.>

<Fine,> said Perry. <I’ll do my part now, then you’ll tell me the rest? I need to go get those men.>

<Sure, chubbo, it’s been a time since I’ve thought about any of this, quite the trip, seein’ it all,> said Queenie. <Now you show me your worlds.>

Perry obliged. He’d had Marchand write up a list of bullet points, things that they’d want to hit, and scenes that were cleared for showing to Queenie. He went through Seraphinus and Teaguewater, along with Earth 2, keeping some of it back from her — no sex scenes on her end.

The sun was starting to rise, so he tried to keep it brief, though it felt like there was more to say about Teaguewater — things that just hadn’t occurred to him until he was looking at Flora’s face, remembering what it was like to have Marchand be so much less helpful, the way he just wanted to get on with it and have the world be finished.

When he was done, he took a break to get some water and check on Grayspear and Anaksi — both were still asleep. He was certain he’d have heard them if they’d gotten up.

<Alright, that’s my part,> said Perry. <You’re ready to keep going?>

<If you are, chubbo,> said Queenie. <You’re in no rush to get those men, are you?>

<It’ll have to be done carefully,> said Perry. <I’m obviously worried about a trap.>

<A trap!> said Queenie. <Well, I hadn’t even thought about settin’ a trap for you, that’s brilliant.>

<Come off it,> said Perry. <We can do this right, get what we want from each other. Tell me the rest of what you have, how you got here.>

<Where’d I leave off, the preachers?> she asked.

<Yes, the preachers,> said Perry.

<Well, the world after that was weirder than any of the ones that came before it,> said Queenie, splashing up an image into their shared senses.