Chapter Text
The moment Five Pebble’s foot brushes the air of the Iterator’s can, he is grabbed by the scruff of the neck by an invisible force and pinned against the wall.
“Disgusting vermin,” the Iterator seethes. Finally, Five Pebbles can get a good look at the weird Iterator that has single-handedly turned the surrounded area into a lifeless wasteland.
He is a little surprised to find that the ‘Wrathful Calculator’, as he has come to call her by now, looks somehow worse than the ashen rubble surrounding her. He’s not that knowledgable about Iterator biology, but he’s pretty sure normal Iterator puppets aren’t supposed to have half of their skin completely seared off, leaving their damaged wires still sparking with electricity to hang out and drag against the floor, which is almost definitely a fire hazard.
“What the hell are you, some kind of scug ? Do slugcats even come in pink?” Wrathful Calculator shakes Five Pebbles’ small body until his vision starts spinning. Her tinny voice is crackling so hard Five Pebbles could barely make out her words- whatever had melted one of her eyes shut must’ve had also severely damaged her speaker system. “Now scugs of all things are crawling into my can. I fucking hate my life.”
Five Pebbles hisses at her mistreatment of him. The Iterator hisses right back.
“How dare you,” Wrathful Calculator snarls at him, and he isn’t sure if it’s because of her damaged speakers or if she was just built differently from the start, but this red Iterator seemed much more capable of creating animalistic growls than the others. “I am the Artificer, the Mother of Herectics, Protector of Living Hope, and you, you worthless bug , you think you can just—”
The odd yellow-red robot from earlier floats through the hole in the ceiling and catches up to him. Finally.
At the entrance of the horned drone, Wrathful Calculator- who had apparently been once called Artificer- drops Five Pebbles to the ground. He yowls in protest, but Artificer doesn’t seem to care. Her functioning eye follows the drone in rapt fascination as it floats towards Five Pebbles.
“...Is that… yours?” Artificer asks. Of course it is, but Five Pebbles doesn’t care about answering.
Instead, Five Pebbles tries to bite her. She yells in protest and removes him from her puppet’s arm, but for some reason, her touch has now turned gentle. She deposits him safely on the ground instead of chucking him at the can walls again. Artificer opens her mouth, then closes it back up again. Her eyes are open wide, and she looks like she was going through a minor mental crisis.
Well, Five Pebbles doesn’t give a single shit. He doesn’t know why this strange red Iterator did a sudden 180 the moment she saw the drone, but he’s still mad at her for yelling at him and calling him a bug. He gives the Iterator the rude gesture he learned from Seven Red Suns.
“You’re in Herectic territory,” Artificer says, sounding amused. “Making the wrath sign at me is not really an insult. Where did you even learn that? I suppose whoever gave you that Mark of Communication…”
Five Pebbles makes a circle with his hands seven times. The Artificer sighs.
“No, not when , I don’t care if you learned it seven cycles ago… Yeah, you know what, I’m not sure why I asked either. Listen, in my city when we want to offend someone else we do this.” She holds up her thumb and bites it. Five Pebbles swallows his whole hand, attempting to follow her example. Artificer cackles in delight.
“Good, good, just like that.” Then she falls silent, suddenly forlorn. Five Pebbles makes a face, having a hard time figuring out what was causing her mood to swinging around like a pendulum. “...Scug, Do you know what that drone is for?”
Five Pebbles shakes his head.
“It’s a citizen drone. You’ve probably noticed, but my original citizens are all… gone. So I suppose that make you my last remaining citizen.”
She gives him a very sad look, expecting him to understand. Five Pebbles is only confused.
Is Artificer still distraught over the mass Ascension of her Ancients? It’s been hundreds and hundreds of cycles since they all decided to die. Spearmaster and Hunter hadn’t seemed to care all that much about their Ancients. Is that why Artificer was so pissed off? Because her citizens are all dead? They chose to die, didn’t they? It’s the thing they’ve wanted ever since they were born!
Maybe this has something to do with the sorry state of her superstructure and the city inside it. Time alone can't have been solely responsible for such a thorough destruction of the steel frames of the city— the only ones who ever had the advanced technology to build such powerful bombs that had scarred the city were the Ancients. So Artificer’s citizens and their Iterator must’ve had some kind of falling out, resulting in the Ancients living here to bomb their old home and abandon Artificer here. That could perhaps explain Artificer’s foul mood.
But no, that doesn't make sense. If that's true, the Artificer would be angry , not sad. And she clearly isn't someone who lacked the capability for anger.
Artificer realizes that Five Pebbles has no idea what she's implying. She folds her legs in a lotus shape and lowers herself to the floor, meeting Five Pebbles at eye level.
“Okay, here's the story. Scug, you probably noticed by now that my city is very different from other Iterator cities.”
True. Five Pebbles nods in agreement. Artificer's city isn't on top of the structure like it was for Spearmaster or Hunter, or the hidden one he'd found without an Iterator. Instead, it is inside of it, made possible by the fact that Artificer has an unusually small amount of hardware infrastructure. This makes Artificer deceptively small— though from the outside she looks just as big as any other Iterator Five Pebbles has ever seen, because most of her structure is filled with the city instead of, well, herself, that means Artificer's actual size is minuscule.
Five Pebbles doesn't know what came first— if her citizens had lived inside Artificer because she didn't need as much space as they had originally anticipated so they used all the leftover free space to build their houses in, or if her citizens decreased her computing capacity in order to create space for their city.
Neither of these possibilities make much sense to him. Seven Red Suns said the Iterators are so massive because they needed a lot of power and a lot of space to run the calculations for the Great Problem. So why is Artificer so small?
“The thing is that I wasn’t created to solve the same problems as other Iterators. My creators were Herectics— they disputed the central doctrine of the Faith that all people must drave a permanent death, and rejected the notion that this was a goal that every individual must strive for. For this, all the various squabbling strains of the Faith came together at once to denounce the Herectics and their philosophy, so my creators were driven out of their Cities and into the wild. They needed a way to protect themselves. So they created me.
“I was never supposed to solve the Great Problem. The problems I were supposed to solve were much smaller in scope. I was made to solve basic day-to-day problems, such as the sewage system or the food supply, and to protect the Herectics from the increasingly hostile Faith.” The Artificer gestured to the cracks running up her puppet and the scorch marks seared onto her can. “As you can see, I failed on that second mission. My citizens were too powerful, too happy , and for that they were dragged back into the Faith’s territory for punishment. Or at least, I assume they were. I fell comatose sometime during the War, and when I woke up, and I woke up to… this. An empty and dying world. Do you know what loss feels like, dear Slugcat?”
Five Pebbles takes issue with this statement. The world isn’t empty. It has him and the rest of his family, like Suns, or Winds, or— Moon—
Slugcat Five Pebbles does know what loss feels like. Artificer seems to sense this somehow, and circles Pebbles slowly, as if she wanted to hug him but was afraid to do so.
“I can tell you’ve been through many things,” Artificer says. “Those yellow scars over your eyes implies a story that I will never get to know. I offer you a choice. Should you choose to remain as my Citizen, you would be signing an implicit Social Contract of my city. I would grant you protection and care, and you would swear your loyalty to me. By which I mean, I will give you access to my city and all its amenities, such as free food and shelter and healthcare, and you will blow up the vermins that keep looting my city of its memories with the bombs and weapons I can provide for you.” The Artificer summons several glowing bombs out of her can and floats them in front of Five Pebbles. “See, ever since I woke up, I found that these wretched things called the Scavengers were tearing out pearls and bricks and pipes and—”
Five Pebbles drowns out her ranting as he stares, transfixed at the grenades and lanterns and cheerybombs laid down for him to freely take. Artificer was right- he’s been through a lot, and he came all the way to her superstructure to forget. And the idea of blowing up a bunch of random Scavs that have offended his new Iterator (big sister) was becoming more and more enticing the more he thought about it.
“And even when I pleaded with them to extricate themselves from my territory—” Artificer cuts herself off when Five Pebbles looks Artificer in the eye and nods. The Iterator gives the slugcat a wide grin, or the closest thing she could do to a maternal smile with no mouth and faceplates ripped off. They shake hands, and Artificer gently pushes him out the door, along with her overseer and Pebbles’ citizen drone.
Five Pebbles makes his way across the degraded architecture of what was once Artifcer’s great city. It doesn’t take long for him to stumble upon one of the local Scav population— Artificer’s city has an unusual amount of them, possibly because of the wealth of leftover loot from the Ancient city. Artificer’s metropolis, after all, has fared better than most other Iterator cities due to being located behind layers and layers of Artificer’s giant walls, providing them protection from weathering instead of every other city exposed directly to the elements.
Artificer’s overseer hovers above Five Pebbles’ head. It floats behind him, as if it was the pup and not Five Pebbles.
The lone Scav raises their spear in cautious defense. They shakes the spear as a threat, but Five Pebbles ignores them. He is not in the mood to care about other creatures right now. When Five Pebbles refuses to be deterred by their spear rattling, the Scav throws it directly at him. Five Pebbles suddenly shoots himself forward, twisting to dodge the spear and planting a bomb directly in their face.
The resulting explosion of gore singes the tips of Pebbles’ feet as he is propelled forward by the force of the bomb. The sound alerts other Scavs, who amble out from the remains of what was once a giant billboard advertising a shoe brand. They hoist their weapons at him.
Next to him, a giant chute opens up from the ground to reveal a hidden stash of bombs and weaponry. The overseer points at it expectantly. Five Pebbles scoops one out of the chute and chucks. Two of them get ripped to shred simultaneously, and their screams, he thinks, sound a lot like his own.
He spends the next three hours wreaking mindless havoc. He can almost convince himself that he’s washing away his sins.