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Dirk Strider was the prince of Derse. At least, that was what his title was, as inaccurate as it was. If anything, he was the god of Derse, and he always had been. The kingdom was a large one, one of the three major ones of the world. Derse was wealthy and made of obsidian and technology and magic. It’s natural resources were not one of the outstanding features of it, but it had enough, and more than enough money to acquire what it lacked.
Dirk had been the ruler of Derse for a good two or three centuries, long enough for stories to be blended and hard to know who he was. It was like that for every ruler of the kingdoms, and it always had been. Dirk and a woman by the name of Roxy Lalonde whom had ruled by his side for as long as he’d been there himself. The neighboring kingdom was a place called Prospit, a place of gold, and sun, and endless resources. It was ruled but a woman named Jane Crocker, and two men, Jake English and John Egbert. Alternia was far away from them both, and generally an unfriendly kingdom. The officials, two men named Dave Strider and Karkat Vantas, were dear friends, and though there was not a time where Dirk, or any of the other rulers would feel hostile to them, the way they ran their kingdom was rigid and with secrecy.
Derse, during the autumn months, was a free, and happy place. Magic flowed here year around, but celebrations were frequent around these times, and always had been. The Goddess of Derse was at the forefront at these times and glowed. She ruled presided in front of the public for these celebrations, and with that, she was busy. This left the God to rule as he always did, unsupervised and with the calculating mind he had.
He was not an unfeeling man, but may have appeared that way, and did not hold any friends or lovers that the kingdom knew of. Roxy had a rather large group of men and women that she called friends, nobles and peasants that she asked for favors, and that she chatted and drank with. Some, even, were lovers. None of them held her attentions for more than a decade, of course, for her youth was never ending, and there’s fleeting, but none had ever regretted entangling themselves with her, or had she regretted them. Dirk did no such thing. He ruled with a hard fist, and a financial mind. He appeared at the festivals he presided over, and he spoke to the public when it was appropriate, but there was very little else to be known about him. Those close to Roxy said he appeared frequently, and some called him friend as well, but none knew him well.
At times, like fall, he could go weeks without being seen by the public, and it was said he disappeared under the castle, doing things no one knew about. He had, in fact, made great efforts to make sure no one knew.
The things no one knew but him were the projects he kept to himself, inventions and magics based more on science then the presiding force known to Derse. He would work on them long hours, sometimes days, and sometimes weeks with little to know sleep or food. He was dedicated to some things he kept hidden from the rest of the world, and could forget a great many things while working, but there was one project, especially, he was obsessed with. His quarters sealed off anyone else were large, three rooms filled with all sorts of odd things that he had at some point or another, in all his years, been interested in. Some projects had melded with others, until not even he could tell the original intentions – yet one remained pristine, untouched by anything else.
A pedestal stood in one of the rooms, in a far, dark corner, with a bowl resting atop it filled with a thin, red liquid. At the bottom of the dish was a thin, shining object. It was a circle with a smaller circle punched out of the middle of it, as old as Dirk himself. Books were laid open by it, books of magic and experimental sciences and studies of the mind. Sections marked out in black ink and others circled in red. There were books of writings in the God’s own hand, notes and theory’s and spells. Frustration could be seen plainly in most his work, if anyone other than himself ever had the pleasure of reading them. Some of the writings spanned back hundreds of years themselves.
Sometimes the Prince would stand for long periods of time, starring down at the bowl, as if he saw shaped and things untold in its depths. And, he did. He saw worlds destroyed and people he didn’t remember, and sights he thought he might have lived through, though lost to him now. He saw the other rulers, though more than them, too. People with only white in their eyes, and in the voids of their soul he felt guilt. Sometimes, he thought he understood the things he saw, had pieced together a story from the bits he’d picked up, but there was always something new to shatter even that. Other times, he knew what he saw wasn’t part of the story at all, though what it was, he didn’t know.
The guilt these visions brought him was enough to drive a normal man insane. Instead, it drove him to work, and more work, and study and learning. He had no natural talent for magic, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use it, and he fought to learn more. He didn’t know what he fought for, for many decades. He’d known he had to do something, learn something, gain something – but he didn’t know what. So, he watched the bowl, for answers, and one day, they were granted to him.
Something inhuman stood in the reflection of the tinted water. Something that looked metallic, and though it lacked in so much, Dirk could recognize that face. It was his. It was like looking into an enchanted mirror, one that did not show the truth. It was unnerving, and the guilt that had possessed Dirk for so long grew stronger until his urge to look away was strong enough to almost make him. Yet, he didn’t, knowing this was to important. Few things he observed in the water saw him, and only one had ever interacted with him – a woman strikingly like Roxy, with eyes of violate. The rarity of something looking back at him is what caught it attention, for the machine – as it could be nothing else – looked around, as if knowing it was being watched. A silent moment passed, before a broken, disjointed voice spoke.
“Di-i-irrk?”
He was startled, and found himself replying to the water, to the thing he saw in the water. “I’m here,” he said, and could taste the disappointment thick in his mouth then the thing could not hear him.
It spoke again, and something in Dirk wanted to fix it, because now that he saw it closer, then thing was broken, brown on the edges and in need of repair. “D-irrk? Wh-eere?” The thing continued to look around, and Dirk suddenly realized it was blind. He wondered if, had it not been, if it would have been able to see him. It didn’t say anything else, though Dirk watched it for a long time. Soon, though, as the visions often did, it faded, until he saw nothing but water, and the disk at the bottom of the bowl.
That had been many years ago, and Dirk had worked since then to be able to control what he saw – with minimum effect, but enough to cause hope. At times, he could go back to seeing the machine, but his luck with controlling the visions was just that – luck. Seeing it was only part of his problem as well, for he became obsessed with the idea of not only observing, but bringing it to him.
His obsession led him though years of study, and even more failure. Time passed, years, as he inched closer to closer to the answer. The hardest part of it all was that he did not understand what he saw, at least not truly. He didn’t know what it was, and so he did not know what to look for – was it another dimension? Was it somewhere far, far away he could have never hoped to reach? What sort of magic would it require?
At times, he wondered if he should ask Roxy for help. She was gifted with magic, as controlled the craft as if it was a part of her – which it was – but Dirk had no such luck. What he did with magic took large amounts of knowledge, and practice, and perhaps she would have just known what to do. Yet, something held him back from asking her. She did not even know about this, about what he watched while he locked himself away down here. Something told him not to show her, and so he didn’t.
No spells he found worked. He used hundreds. He used anything he knew. He spent years going through books of dimensional theories, and the spells that went along with them, and none made any difference. After some time, he started to combine them, map out equations on why they worked, and how he could bend them around each other, and manipulate them. His knowledge on magic grew until he understood it, as if it were science. Some would say he was an expert, though little help that was to him. Some spells he created from others didn’t work – and he didn’t know if it was for his lack of skill, or for a mistake he’d made when crafting it.
The process was frustrating, and slow with no rewards. He worked tirelessly, however, and silently. Many years passed, before he found a book with his answers – and in the end, he didn’t even have to look. One morning, a servant came to him in the dining hall as he ate with Roxy and a few of her most recent lovers, two women and a man, all of whom Dirk liked the company of. The servant was a troll with a thick Alternian accent – Dirk didn’t recognize him, either, but it didn’t matter as he held out a book wrapped in purple cloth.
“Prince,” he addressed Dirk, “A woman sought me tonight in the court yard. She gave me no name, but she gave me this.” Roxy and her lovers had fell silent, watching Dirk as he accepted the book from the shaken-looking servant. He thought, first, not to trust the book. There had been no attempt at gaining power in many decades, but this was a strange present, received in strange ways. He couldn’t be too careful. “She told me to take it to you at my own time, saying you’d been in need of it – been in need of it –“ He looked as if he was having trouble getting out his message, but Dirk waited patiently. “-For many years, and you could wait some time more.” Dirk froze in his suspicions.
The troll bowed to Dirk, but didn’t leave. Dirk eyed the book, before setting it aside, beside his dinner plate. “Very well,” He nodded to the servant, “Thank you for bringing it to me. Was that all she said?”
The boy nodded, “Yes, Prince, that was all she said.”
“I see. Well, then, again, thank you.” It was a dismissal, and the troll was somewhat disappointed, Dirk though. He’d wanted to know what the book contained, but wasn’t about to ask. He bowed, again, before he retreated out of the room, and left the dinner party alone.
Roxy spoke up, looking across the table. “What is it?” She asked, excited.
“A book,” Dirk returned plainly as he continued on his food. He could see her frown, but didn’t heed it. She asked to look at it several times throughout the rest of that night, but Dirk brushed her off effectively until she retired, now with only one of the women she’d had earlier, one Dirk hoped would be sticking around.
He made his way downstairs, book in hand, and thinking over what the servant had said. He wondered what, exactly, it would, and had hopes in the back of his mind. For some reason, the cryptic message thinking of nothing but his pedestal and the answers he sought for it. As he finally reached his work place, his intuition had proven correct. He’d come to a table that had been piled with pieces of metal and cleared a place for himself to lay the book down, and carefully unwrap it from it’s purple binding. A leather-bound book was in it, laying atop the cover, a note.
“Dearest Dirk,
I hope you are faring well, and I know you are. Your kingdom is prospering, as is Prospit and Alternia. I would love to tell you of myself, and my life, but I don’t suppose you’d care much for it. Regardless, I am well, as are my companions, and I hope it brings you some sort of comfort to know this. My travels have led me to many, many sources of knowledge, all of which have been interesting, and some of which have been useful. It has taken me almost as long to gather this information as it has for you to gather yours, and I hope it coincides well.
I hope you continue to rule your kingdom kindly and fairly, and please watch over Roxy for me. I’m sure your Strider instincts will guide you well if you choose not to let them blind you. I trust you will like what knowledge I have to offer to you. I’ll be Watching.
Yours always,
RL”
The signature was in a light purple ink, swirling and elegant. At the bottom of the note was more writing, in a dark green.
“I, As Well, Hope You And Roxy Are Doing Spectacularly. -KM”
With that, all that was left for Dirk to look at was the book, but he found himself reading over the note again. And again. This person spoke as if they knew him, but he couldn’t place the signature. He couldn’t think of anyone it could have been. The truth was, he knew very few people outside of Roxy and the other rulers – and even the others, he had a complicated relationship with. Being with Roxy was easy, as breathing was, but that only came from the sheer amount of time they’d spent with each other, millennia perhaps. The others were like people he’d known long, long ago, but now there was only things he no longer remembered to hold them together. So who was the person who had sent this to him?
After some time, he put the note aside, and opened to book. Hand-written pages greeted him, the same writing of the body of the note he’d read. It wasn’t an overly thick book, but it was by no means skinny – a good two hundred pages, maybe, and what it had to tell him immediately drew him in.
At points, it was frustratingly vague, and others the book went through basics in excruciating detail – things he knew quiet well. Whoever had written it didn’t understand magic the way he did, didn’t understand the deeper points of why it was the way it was, but he knew the author understood things much deeper than he did, things that weren’t quiet told explicitly in the text. Maybe there was no way for these things to be laid out to understand them. He’d encountered the same factor when reading about magic in other documents, too – a factor all about feeling, and probably the reason magic was magic and not science.
The book even mentioned to disk at the bottom of his bowl – calling the ‘Sburb CD’, but didn’t say much else about it. It talked about pieces of what he saw in the disk, talking about a woman named Feferi once or twice, but only in passing. He didn’t understand a lot of it, but he didn’t think that was all his fault – it was missing part of the story he needed to understand it quite obviously, and there was no doubt about it. Things the author had left out on purpose.
He didn’t complain about that, though, for all he didn’t get in plot, he got in cold, hard facts. It would seem what he’d been seeing all these years in the water were three things, primarily – a place; in the past, a place; without any time at all, and a place; in the present. This place was not specified where it was – it was not another universe, but it wasn’t this one. A footnote even read ‘is it even real?’. Somethings he could remember, and know exactly which of these they fit into, but others it was hard to pull apart at all. He didn’t spend much time deciphering them, though – after all, there was only one vision he was after, that of the machine he’d seen, broken and rusted.
It took him weeks to get through the book, rereading it, writing notes in his own studies. Trying to understand what it was it was telling him. A place that wasn’t really a place in three different times was hard to work out how to get there. The book had some musings as on how to do so, but they weren’t as helpful as he would have liked. Whoever RL was had come up with the same conclusion he had – they would have to splice spells together to try and get there, let alone bring something back. In fact, Dirk didn’t even think he could get there. It would be a matter of teleporting his target, here.
He studied spells on how this could be done, even just physically. Teleportation spells were rare – let alone objects. They required symbols below the object in question, and the desired location. Dirk had to find out a way to compensate for that, with the other spells being morphed into one. Weeks passed of notes, and spells, and practicing with various things here, with disturbing results. Some of the symbols the book had told him to work with, he’d never even heard or seen before, but it was true – he couldn’t do it without them. He’d tried. He was able to work out what some of them added to the equation, but others remained a mystery. He tried different combinations of RL’s spells, and his own, and others he thought might work. Some things he tried to teleport ended up from being a completely inanimate object to something living, fleshy, bleeding, and wrong. This magic was something he had thought impossible.
All the while as he tried to piece something working together, he watched the machine when the bowl would let him see it. From the first time he’d seen it, it had not changed much. In fact, he’d only seen it move more then it’s head once – it was stationary, sat against a wall, looking around from time to time with broken eyes. Dark rust creeped farther and farther up every time he saw it. Where it was looked like it may have once been living quarters, but was now dark and void of life. Water creeped in at times, from a shattered window above it. Dirk could see an endless ocean out of it.
Each time it’s image came into Dirk’s view; he grew more desperate to finish this. He had to. Yet, the spell never turned out right, and he knew it couldn’t. Teleporting one thing from one place to the other was not what he was trying to do. Nothing he set up could duplicate what the barrier between the place his target was, and where he was. A world away, a universe away, Dirk had no idea how that would affect the spell. So, he did it again, and again, and studied what it did, every time. He wrote down everything he saw, everything he did, if he did anything differently. He used chalk, he used led, he used anything he could get his hands on to draw out the symbols he would need, and did it again. Nothing made a difference.
It was a week or two after the final fall festival, that he sat in a study in the north side of the castle with Roxy, that she said anything about his project to him. Roxy has spent the days the festival had lasted drinking more than anyone else, laughing, singing, and holding ceremonies. She’d woken up from it hung over, irritable, and complaining loudly that she would never, ever drink again, despite being held as the Goddess of Alcohol (among other things) in most people’s eyes. She had done this every year for as long as Dirk could remember, and while it would not last into the winter celebrations, it gave her a few weeks of sobriety. Dirk had spent a bit more time with her then he normally would, half in his frustration and half in enjoying her company. She had a cup of something like a weak tea while he went over things he’d have to hold meetings for in the next few days, concerning the kingdom, a glass of strong wine in his hand.
She paid no attention to his work, and he didn’t share – She trusted him to tell her anything that needed attention, and while some things did, none were immediate. They could wait. He didn’t really think she’d listen to him, anyway, because she had a faraway look in her eyes that meant she was thinking about something, and as she was looking at him, he could only assume he was at the center of it. He didn’t ask, however, because if she didn’t want to share, she wouldn’t. Sometimes, he thought he didn’t know anything close to what was going on in her mind, and this was one of those times, which was only proven when she spoke up. “Dirk, are you listening to me?” She asked, quietly in the silent room.
Dirk gave a hum that wasn’t a yes, and wasn’t a no, assuming she’d take it for whatever she wanted. However, she surprised him, staying silent, and he realized she may have wanted his actual attention, so he raised his head. “Yes, Roxy,” He answered, leaning back in his patted chair, drink in hand, “I’m listening to you.”
“You’re stalling,” She said immediately, and then went on, “I don’t know what your stalling, but it’s eating you up.” She wasn’t always a straight forward person, the likes that could keep even Dirk himself on his feet, but here, she seemed to have no questions about it.
Dirk thought he probably knew what she was talking about, but had to clarify. “What?” He questioned, “I’m not stalling anything. What could I be?”
She shrugged, looking down at her tea, and swirling it around. She sounded almost dejected, and guilt swirled in his chest. “I don’t know,” she sighed, “Whatever you’re doing, down there in the basement, you tell me. It’s cold down there.”
It was, too. The closer to winter, the only real warm places in the castle would be the closest to the center of it. He was silent, mulling over what she had said. It would be unfair of him to deny doing anything, but she hadn’t really asked to know, so he didn’t volunteer to tell her. Instead, he finished his wine, and stood, letting the planning he had to do for Derse wait until tomorrow. He looked to her, and agreed, “Yes, I suppose I am stalling.” He’d at least give her that.
She looked up at him, pink eyes wiser then they seemed. “Well then,” She stated boldly, “Stop it.”
She wasn’t wrong, and her advice was good. He was stalling, and it was slowly making his anxiety over it worse. He needed to get it done. He retired to his chambers that night, and slept fitfully, and he rose the next day and canceled everything he’d had planned to do, It wasn’t like him – but he wasn’t going to stall any longer.
Setting up the spell was like second nature after all the times he’d done it, but nerve wracking all the same. He went to the pedestal holding what had brought him all this obsession, and was thankful he was able to pull up the image he wanted – his poor, broken obsession, that looked around once again, as if it felt itself being watched. He felt the need to talk to it once more, to tell it he was here – but, it couldn’t hear him, so he took a breath, and began the spell.
Conducting it on something in a whole other plain of existence was odd, and felt different from any of the other things he’d done. He felt himself relax, because suddenly he knew it was right. Decades of having to study, to search for answers was coming to a head, and he knew he’d gotten the equation to do it correct.
The spell wrapped itself around his target slowly, his hands thrumming with energy he had never felt. His lack of talent didn’t seem to matter with his practice, and once it took hold, with no chance of backing out, it was on to start the second part of it. It was like pulling, pulling on the machine he’d watched for so long. He pulled at it for some time – a time he couldn’t really place. He felt as if it could have been seconds, or hours, straining for all he could.
And then, the connection snapped.
Whatever he was pulling broke with a what he could have sworn was an audible pop, like a bone pulling out of it’s socket. He nearly physically stumbled with the weight he felt dropping. His eyes had closed, sometime during the spell, but the flew open now, and he’d walked backwards a few steps from the pedestal, which he quickly gained again, looking down into the water. The machine still sat against the wall – but it was somehow different.
At times he’d seen it, and feared it dead, for all it didn’t move, but this was different. The small, red, blinking lights he’d become accustomed to watching go slowly on and off were gone. There was something about it that made Dirk recognize it was void of anything, the body just an empty shell. Dirk felt sick. He felt panic in him, welling from the bottom of his stomach to his –
“Dir-“ Something behind him cut off, making a choking noise, and he spun around to see what it was.
A boy lay on the cold, cement floor, flesh and blood, and small. He was so much smaller then Dirk, red hair and freckles going down to his shoulders. He was breathing, but Dirk couldn’t see much other movement, laying on his stomach and in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable. Dirk rushed forward to him, kneeling down to gently move him, until he was more on his back, propped up a bit on Dirk. He was light, much to skinny, and younger then Dirk. His head didn’t support itself for a moment, his red eyes focusing in and out, but finally landing on Dirk, looking dazed. “-Dir-“ He was cut off again, coughing, but not as wracking this time.
Dirk shushed him, already getting ready to get to his feet, and ready to pull the boy along with him. “Shush,” He found himself saying, a name coming to his mind as if he had remembered it this whole time. “I’m here, Hal.”