“I fucking hate the desert.” Margaret complained loudly, her boots plodding against fine sand as her combat suit automatically adjusted her balance for the constantly shifting terrain. There was a round of chorused agreement, every member of my team groaning with her as we trekked onwards.

“What even was our mission, again?” Baron called from the back, and I forced down the flash of annoyance that flared inside of my chest. This was the third time I’d have to explain it.

“There was a spike in hera radiation recorded in the area.” I snapped. Honestly, if they had just read the logs before the start of the mission… I forced myself not to stomp my foot in annoyance. Both Dad and grandpa had said any good leader would control her emotions. “We’re to scout ahead, report if we see any signs of Rift Expansion. If there are, we’re to set up a classification zone and report it to RCO. If not, eliminate the entity that’s releasing hera radiation and call it a day.”

There’s a collective groan from the group again. Come on guys, we like, volunteered for this!

“I hope it’s not a Rift...” Gaster murmurs from the middle. We all turn to him, and he immediately shrinks in on himself, his helmet closing around his face while his large frame draws inwards. I roll my eyes, and turn back to the front.

Gaster, always so unsure of himself. If he would just…

Wait. Three large sentient creatures just entered my passive psionic field.

“Contact!” I called, drawing my phase sword and focusing my attention on the vibrations beneath my feet. “Three psio sigs underground, two hundred meters and closing!” My team all nodded, raising rifles or phase swords and preparing for contact. I sensed limited intelligence coming from the psionic signatures, mostly hunger and the sensations of tremors in the ground where my team walked.

Our form fitting black power armor begins to glow as it activates its camouflaging feature, bending light to make all of us nearly imperceptible to sight and constructing a helmet around our faces. My vision is immediately overlapped with thermal and electroreceptive sensors, but I screw my eyes shut to concentrate, sending my mind outwards in a psionic pulse.

I focused, ignoring the sun that was scorching my skin through the cracks in my damaged power armor, the sand dunes subtly shifting underneath my weight, the sweat that beaded up in an attempt to cool me off only to evaporate as soon as it formed. I pushed all of it out of my mind, all to focus on the three sigs that were quickly approaching us, reading their intent, their animalistic intelligence that quickly calculated who the weakest target was among our group.

My eyes snapped open, and I spun around. “GASTER, MOVE YOUR ASS!” I screamed, and I saw his bulky form turn towards me. I can pinpoint the exact moment he realizes what I mean. Second by torturous second, his feet shift in an attempt to propel him sideways.

Too slow.

The sand underneath him erupts upwards as a wurm engulfed him, power armor and all. One moment he’s there, and the next a towering ten meter long wurm is sailing through the air where he was, showering sand down on all of us.

“GASTER!” I’LL FUCKING KILL THAT THING!

FOCUS ALL OF MY PSIONIC POWER ON THAT UGLY FUCKING BEAST, AND RAKE AT IT WITH MY MIND!

The wurm writhes in the air, staying above ground for a few precious seconds, and we all swarm it. Gunfire erupts, energy and material bullets slamming into the carapace of the wurm. Its peach colored armor blended in with the sand, making it look like we were attacking a small dune instead of a living thing.

I stabbed my phaser into it, the blade vibrating as soon as it made contact with flesh and cutting it at the cellular level.

This is for Gaster, you overgrown earthworm!

I dash along its side, splitting open the carapace and spilling its internal organs down the desert sand. The wurm remains eerily soundless, even as it’s thrashing stops and it grows still. I sense the other two sigs rapidly approaching, moving directly under-

“MARGARET, SAMPSON, DODGE!” I scream, and they hurriedly follow my order, black body armor propelling them to the side as two more wurms erupt out of the sand. They’ve narrowly avoided being swallowed like Gaster was. I can’t sense his psionic signature anymore, and judging by the rows and rows of jagged teeth I can see down the wurms’ throats as they wave around in the air, I know why.

I fucking hate wurms.

“OPEN FIRE!”

More physical rounds are fired, cracking open carapace, while the energy rounds roast the soft flesh inside. I latch on to their minds, my core burning in my chest as I rapidly expend energy to send sensation after sensation of feeblement into their minds, ensuring they can’t escape.

That’ll teach thos-

OH MY GOD IT FUCKING HURTS!

Shock floods my system, numbing the pain for a few moments, and I look down to see a scythe that has pierced through my chest.

HOLY SHIT UNGAL FUCKING CUNT WHAT THE FU-

-

I gasp awake, clawing at my chest. HAVE TO SAVE MY TEAM! HAVE TO-

“It’s okay.” Someone says to my right, and I turn to look at them. My heart’s racing, and I can feel my clothes sticking to my body with the sweat that’s soaked them. The person who spoke was…

Gaster!?

He gives me that stupid smile of his that makes my heart flutter, his huge hand resting on my shoulder, and he pushes his glasses up on his stupid, chubby, cute face, complimented by his stupid, clear, chocolate brown skin.

“How are you…” Oh. Wait a second. Fucking ow! I rub my temples as a headache forms, information flooding into my brain.

“Yep, there it is. Hit me just as hard.” Gaster says soothingly, just the barest hint of that cute accent his dad had in his deep voice. Ugh.

I brush his hand off, looking around and seeing the rest of my team… my friends, laying on cushioned chairs, their circlets connected to the neurolink around their forehead.

That’s right. We were in a sim room, paid for by the Academy. White, anesthetic lights, cushioned neurolink sim pods, and big screen monitors next to each of the sim pods depicting different angles of each person in the simulation.

I looked at one of the monitors by my side, which had a wide angled view of my team as they desperately fought against the two entities that had made an appearance right after the wurms.

I looked accusingly at Gaster, as he watched the footage along with me.

“You were the first one out.” I said, and he turned his head away sheepishly.

“I told yeh, I wasn’t supposed to be here.” He says, and I immediately felt bad. He didn’t have a core, mutated or natural. The only reason he was here was because he was my friend.

Then I felt angry for feeling bad. “You still said you had been in a sim pod before!” I snapped, and he shrank in on himself even more.

“Yeah…” He muttered, casting his eyes to the ground. “For BF. I didn’t think you guys were, you know, training. I thought it was just for fun.”

GAH! STOP MAKING ME FEEL BAD!

Suddenly I hear a gasp, and a familiar figure frantically sits up, scrabbling at his chest. I turn to the screen just in time to see his in-sim avatar stabbed through with a scythed tentacle, two dark figures working their way through our team in the simulation.

“It was just a simulation.” I call out from my own pod, Baron’s already pale skin turned even more pale with the shock of death. He looks at me, light blue eyes wide, and I gesture to the screen on our sides.

“Oh thank god.” He breathes in relief, shaking.

I look from him, to the figures carefully picking at our team’s broken formation. They’re pretty strange looking, with two tentacles that end in a scythe, yellow eyes, and constantly shifting skin. They blink in and out of existence, disappearing from one spot to reappear in another.

“What are those things?” I ask, turning back to Baron. As our Rift expert, he should have at least some idea.

He also looks at the screen, before shrugging. “I dunno. Stalkers, maybe? I know Androtech was experimenting with Rift entities that masked themselves from perception.” I frowned, and he seemed to notice, because he clarified shortly after. “Not visible light, but reality perception. As in they become totally invisible to reality itself. Cat 4.”

I nod, and turn to Gaster. His lips are pursed, as he studies the screen.

“We were missing a regroup point in the event of a third party.” He mutters under his breath. “Should probably…” His eyes flick to me, and he turns his head away, embarrassed.

Which causes me to blush.

God damnit. Alright, enough of Gaster.

I unhook my circlet from my sim pod, feeling my shoulders pop and my back crack as I stretch out, swinging my feet to rest on the warm floors of the sim room.

There’s another desperate gasp for air, and Raimey sits up, looking at all of us in bewilderment.

“Simulation.” We all call out in unison, and his eyes lighten in understanding.

“God bless Stillera, I thought I’d be able to recognize it.” He grumbles, catching his breath.

We all sit in silence, watching the last of our team members, Margaret, fight against all of the odds. She’s performing well, dodging out of the way of two heavily injured wurms, and riding the edge of the stalker’s range, picking up our dropped ammunition and unloading it into the entities. She drops one wurm, then a stalker, and another wurm. For just a moment we believe she might be able to do it, but a scythe catches her in her heel before she can fully move out of the way and she goes down. She fires a few rounds into the stalker’s direction, but it’s too late. Another tentacle erupts out of the sand just in front of her, and she drops.

Margaret is in tears when she wakes up, sobbing in relief when she realizes we’re all still alive. She sobs harder when we reassure her it was just a sim.

After our team settles down, we all review our logs and replay the sim feed, trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong.

“I… got a little too emotional when one of our team members went down.” I acknowledged, glancing at Gaster. He didn’t seem to notice what I meant, just nodding as he followed along his own notes.

But Baron noticed, and he smirked.

“Don’t you say a fucking thing.” I snapped at him mentally, and he rolled his eyes but let it pass.

“I focused too much on keeping the wurms in place with a psionic assault, and missed the other two Rift entities that were in the area as a result. I’ll chalk this one up as my fault.”

The rest of the group begins to protest, but I hold up my hand. As the only one in the room with a natural core, I held seniority. “No, really. This one was my bad.”

They grumble among themselves, but accept the verdict. Good. A leader should always take responsibility.

“Let’s run it again!” Margaret suggests, her sea-green eyes flaring with determination, and a round of chorused agreement follows her. I glance at Gaster, and smile when I see a look of determination on his face. Alright, since everyone wants one more. I hope I sound more confident than I feel. Seeing them die… rattled me.

“Alright, the Academy has booked our Androtech sim room for the day, so one more time shouldn’t hurt. Same scenario, same mission. Let’s get to work.”

-

The woman snaps awake, the haze that had clouded her mind clearing as she returns to consciousness.

The last thing she had remembered was walking around a shopping mall with her friends on her day off from work, and then feeling the distinct urge to follow a man into a side shop for some reason. She looks around wildly, straining to lift her body up before finally realizing that her mouth is gagged and her limbs are bound.

She notices a lamp in the corner, its flickering flame causing shadows to dance along the bricked walls of her prison. The shockingly awful smell and the sound of flowing water immediately reminds her of a sewer system.

A soft, off-key humming to the tune of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ echoes throughout sewer cavernous room she's in, as a figure clad in a dirty, patchwork lab coat with ‘Androtech Research Head’ labeled on the back carefully selects their instruments, wiping them with a dirty cloth.

The woman with disheveled hair and torn clothing, arms and legs bound to a surgical table, stares at the figure in abject terror. Her own muffled cries around the gag in her mouth mingle with the softly hummed tune, creating a horrifying, off sync harmony.

The figure pauses, turning to them with a bright smile.

“Ah, you’ve finally regained consciousness. I was wondering when you would.” He murmurs, before turning back to the various surgical instruments at his side. She strains her head to see what he has beside him, and when she does her body grows ice cold with dread. Besides scalpels, forceps, and scissors, he has various pieces of pulsing… somethings, lining the table. They loosely resemble organs of some kind, but they’re just the right kind of wrong to call them such. Pulsing at just the wrong time, nearly pitch black instead of flesh colored, and too small or too large to be correct.

She watches as the figure, his face hidden behind a surgical mask and his body obscured by his patchwork coat, gingerly picks up one of the organs and brings it to his tray of instruments.

“Tell me,” He says, his voice lilting but cracked, peaking and softening at random, “do you know my favorite thing about nursery rhymes?”

Ah, she thinks to herself, he’s crazy.

A tear slips past her cheek, even as she continues crying out desperately around her gag.

He holds up a scalpel, slicing the organ open. What look to be miniature tentacles spill out of it, as he peels it open even wider and grabs another organ.

“My favorite thing about nursery rhymes,” He continues in that strange, lilting tone, “is that they all depict horrific, historic events in the most soothing way possible. They’re made for children to understand, after all. Tragedies, wrapped up in a little present for children to sing to their fellows. Warning them about history in a way they can comprehend.”

His glasses flash in the lamplight as he turns to her, a wide smile on his face. “But all of those events were important foundations in the history of humans on earth. A structural weakness that allowed a kingdom to be conquered. A plague that wiped out half of a continent, to be wary of.”

He places the organs next to her, gently, and her breathing speeds up as he rests a scalpel against her skin, the metal cool and sharp.

“I’m going to help you ascend.” He whispers conspiratorially, the piercing blue eyes behind his glasses fervent with madness. “I’m going to allow you to commune with the Great One, as I have.” He shivers in delight, his eyes gaining a faraway look.

“I was just like you. Frightened, uncomprehending of the gift of understanding They brought to me. But don’t worry.” He leans in, his lips pressing against her ear. “You’ll learn, when you are brought closer to Their image. And soon, our society will teach children nursery rhymes about you. Another important event in our history." He leans away, adjusting his glasses. "The first to reach ascension.”

She screams, as the scalpel pierces her flesh. And the man continues humming.