This Is The Way The World Starts, Part 4

In common with big projects everywhere, the work on Mundus seemed to go on forever. And then one day it was suddenly finished, and everyone gathered in the control center to see it formally commissioned.

Lorkhan sought out Akatosh in the crowd. "So, big day today. Are you excited?"

"Excited? No! Nervous more like." Akatosh blinked rapidly. "Have you seen the kalpas? There are things moving in there already. Arkay says they're souls"

"Well, we did set out to make a nurturing environment" said Lokhan. "I suppose we shoudn't be surprised if a few move in early".

"A few?" Akatosh was growing agitated. "They've been proliferating! There must be billions of them. Think how many events they'll generate! I can't possibly manage that many!"

"Dude, relax! You won't have to. That's what the machinery is for", said Lorkhan.

"Well, yes... but suppose something goes wrong?"

"Nothing is going to go wrong", said Lorkhan. "Now shush! Magnus is speaking".

Magnus was standing on a temporary podium set up for the occasion.

"Hello everyone. Thank you for coming. This is the day we activate Mundus". Magnus gave speeches like he did everything else. Methodically, with considerable forethought, and without undue emotion. You could almost imagine he was ticking each sentence off against a checklist.

"I'd like to thank you for your hard work. Everyone has worked very hard to make this possible. But no one has worked harder than Akatosh. So it is fitting that he has the honour of pushing the button".

Magnus stopped speaking then, his checklist all ticked off, while everyone else looked at one another in confusion. Was there more to come? What happened now? So it fell to Lorkhan to inject a little showmanship into the occasion.

"All right folks, you heard the man! Let's have a big hand for our very own Time Dragon - Akatosh!" And then in quieter tones to Akatosh, "Go on, dummy, get up there! You're on!"

Akatosh was ushered up on stage with only minimal pushing and prodding from Lorkhan. On the podium was a big red button to power up the system. Lorkhan decided not to relinquish the MC role.

"All right buddy, on a count of five. Count him down with me folks!"

"FIVE!"

"FOUR"

"THREE"

"TWO"

"ONE"

"Hit it!"

Akatosh reached out and pressed the button. There was a rising hum as generators spun up, a dimming of the lights as in response to the sudden power drain ... and then an anti-climatic whine as the generators died and the lights came back up.

"Teething troubles folks!" Said Lorkhan, waving his arms. "Nothing to worry about."

"There should not be any teething troubles", said Magnus. "This was all supposed to be thoroughly tested. Someone get me a diagnostic!"

"It looks like the secondary systems failed to kick in", said Julianos from a side console. "Entropy, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics ... none of it is starting up without the time flow to pull it in..."

"Why am I only hearing about this now?" asked Magnus.

"It all works just fine from the test consoles. At a pinch we could manage those functions by hand".

"Preposterous!" said Magnus. "When the time flow starts, those workstations will be paradox-locked. You'll be there for the rest of Eternity!"

"Well, what if we are?" asked Kynnareth. "It's no more than Aka has been doing for all of us. Some of us would welcome a chance to give something back".

"If we're going to do this, I want it done properly", said Magnus. "So why is there no temporal field being generated? Lorkhan, you were doing QA on that subsystem I believe?"

"Not me, boss. Akatosh was doing that one".

"Was I?", asked Akatosh. "Maybe you haven't asked me yet, that can happen. I get so confused sometimes ..."

"And the minutes of the last oversight meeting appear to have been misfiled", said Magnus. "I don't suppose anyone has a copy to hand?"

"Look, why don't we save the post-mortem for later", said Lorkhan, quietly crumpling the last copy of the document in question deeper into the back pocket of his jeans. "We need to get that time-flow working".

Magnus got down on his hands and knees and levered up one of the floor panels. "No, no, no! This is all completely wrong! The tauconductors are all crosswired when they should be in parallel".

"So... that's bad, is it?"

"Of course it's bad! This configuration will support a temporal field, amplify it even, but you won't be able to instigate it from the generators. This will all have to come out! We'll need to rewire all the kalpas."

Lorkhan looked doubtful. "If we do that we'll need to strip everything down to the ground. It would almost be faster to start from scratch. Are you sure we can't just jury rig it?"

"If we are going to do this, it will be done properly", said Magnus. "We will not be 'jury rigging' anything".

"I'm not saying we need to leave it like that", said Lorkhan. "Just a hack to get it working. We can lash something up for the moment and fix it later".

"'Lash something up?'" Magnus was fairly quivering with indignation. "I am Magnus! I do not 'hack'. I do not 'lash'. I do not 'jury rig'. We have procedures in place and they! Will! Be! Followed!" This was as much emotion as anyone had seen Magnus display ... well, ever. It was like being barked at by a sheep.

"Sure, sure", said Lorkhan. "It's just a shame to disappoint all these good people is all. We just need a quick and dirty bodge so they can see it working..."

"'Quick?' 'Dirty?'" For a moment it looked as if Magnus would explode. Then, mastering his offended professionalism, he turned his back on Lorkhan and folded his arms.

"This", he announced grandly, "is what I get for working with amateurs". And with that he used the power of his mind to surround himself with a psychokinetic force bubble, and then he levitated straight up, punching a neat round hole in the thaumic shielding as he went.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then most of the workers Magnus had brought to the project decided that they'd better follow the boss. "Yes, humpf! Amateurs!" they muttered, and floated off leaving a constellation of lesser holes around Magnus' exit point.

"Well", said Akatosh. "That's torn it."

"Don't worry about him", said Lorkhan. "I'll talk him round later. For now we need to get this thing working. You heard him say it would carry a field once it was established? I reckon if folks would like to man the secondary workstations, all it would need is for you to give time a push".

So they all made space and the various team members moved to their respective workstations. Then Akatosh stood in the middle, miming pushing motions and grunting and shuffling his feet. Nothing else happened.

"It doesn't seem to be working", Lorkhan said, after a while.

"I'm sorry", said Akatosh. "Every time I push, it's like time pushes back and neither of us go anywhere. I'm just not strong enough, I guess".

"Now don't do yourself down", said Lorkhan. "It sounds like you just need something to brace yourself against".

"Yes, that could work", said Akatosh, and he reached into himself and through himself and snapped one of the big black spines off of Alduin's tail and jammed it into the ground. The spike shuddered and grew and rooted itself sending offshoots into all the kalpas even as it grew into a great black tower. "That should do the job", said Akatosh.

Now the Time Dragon braced himself against the newly grown tower, took a firm hold of Time and pushed with all his might. The generators hummed as they spun up to speed, the lights dimmed and Akatosh screamed as the temporal current snatched him up and sucked him into the nearest kalpic intake.

"Yes!" Lorkhan had begun to think he was never going to get to this point. Now all he needed to do was chase after and grab Akatosh's tail before the generators accelerated the Dragon too fast to be caught.

Lorkhan turned to sprint after Akatosh and bounced off a gold-skinned brick wall.

Trinimac was having a moment of clarity.

What can we say about Trinimac? Brave, loyal, dependable, Trinny was your go-to guy if you needed to know anything about lifting weights or applying body oil. Beyond that, well, he wasn't exactly known for the depth of his insight, or the originality of his thought. Still once he got an idea in his head, it stayed there.

"You meant for this to happen", said Trinimac. "You meant for this to happen all along!"

Now, everyone knows this bit of the story, so perhaps we can gloss over the gory details. Trinimac experiments with some innovative techniques for open heart surgery and Lorkhan discovers that he can, in fact, live through having his heart removed. Try as he might, Trinny can't seem to stop the Heart from beating and all the time, the Heart pokes fun at his efforts.

"You know, Trinny", the Heart remarks, "sooner or later you're going to get bored and wander off, and then Lorkhan will put me back in his chest and it'll all be as good as new".

"Is that so?" says Trinny. "Well, he'll have to find you first!" And Trinimac starts making to fasten the Heart to an arrow so he can shoot it far, far away.

Now it is fair to say that Lorkhan is not at this point his usual quick-witted self, being somewhat faint headed with pain, blood loss, shock and what have you. All the same, it occurs to him that once Trinny gets through with the Heart he might decide to similarly distribute Lorkhan's other body parts. And so Lorkhan takes advantage of Trinny's preoccupation to make himself scarce, staggering off down one of the kalpas at random and wondering how long he'll need to wait before someone invents a workable prosthetic heart.

And the crowd at Mundus Control decides that the show must be over and goes home. Lorkhan's old gang, the Daedra, conclude that Mundus wasn't an entirely stupid idea, even if it was horribly over-engineered. A few of them even comment that they might try something similar for themselves. On a smaller scale, maybe. The general feeling about Lorkhan is that he got what he deserved for being a sap, although Boethia was heard to mutter darkly about Trinimac getting what was coming to him some day.

Akatosh remains trapped in the kalpas. He sees now that he wasn't pushing time, he was being time, and now the Mundus engines drive him faster and faster through the kalpas. He still has to manage all of the sequencing by hand, and try as he might it's just too much for him. Luckily his daughters, the Jills, follow along behind him catching all the things he drops. (Apparently being a Time Dragon means you can always find time for a little bit of nookie). And every now and then it gets too much for him and he breaks down altogether and then nothing happens right for a while.

And Lorkhan goes staggering down the kalpas, sometimes lucid, sometimes not. He still hasn't given up on the notion of escaping from Creation, but he has a few things to take care of first. For a start, he'll probably have to patch things up with Akatosh, and that may take some doing.

And Magnus is still refusing to speak to anyone involved in the project, and the Aedra remain sealed into their control stations, hand-operating the laws of nature.

And the rest, as they say, is History.