"I am providing emotional support to all lonely, human boys and girls," the Skinwalker defended herself. "Mostly my little fox eyes sleep on their monitors. Right now tho? Now, the Omnid Seers are confused. They see me blinking at them from everywhere at once. It scrambles, derails their tracking. They think the planet is infested with fox spirits. Which... it kinda is. Le le le."

  "You're certain that the Seers and Scruts cannot target you?" Galateya asked.

  "Not easily," Sage said. "They are looking for a nail to hammer, for a mage tower to nuke. I am fog. I am omnipresent cringe culture. They can't Corpse-Seeker-orbital-strike a JPEG file of a fox fanart spread across a million hard drives."

  "Clever,” I said.

  "Local advantage," Sage tapped her temple. "The dum’ alien gals... bring their big crystal guns and OP magitek. They don't really belong here tho'. This Earth constantly rejects, confuses them. Me? I am mud. I am dirt. I am weeds. I grew up here. I know how to chain a fox to a fox to a fiber optic cable to a meme file. They are playing chess. I am playing Starcraft with map hacks.”

  “I see.” I smiled at her nerdy ranting.

  “Mhmmm.” Sage nodded. “For all of their fancypants warships, they’re guests in my house. It’s like they’re trying to use a microscope as a hammer. Making lots of noise, pawing at everything and nothing. Skinwalkers are pros in general at hiding themselves. I’m a clever sneaky sneak.”

  “What are their plans in general?” I asked.

  "They will buy us," Sage said.

  "What?" Galateya asked

  "Immigration, T-bun," Sage revealed. "Improvements. The Gardeners. The Sixth Fleet. They are the 'nice' ones, right? They won't shoot. They'll land soon and start setting up big gates. They'll offer cures for all the cancers. They'll try to solve world hunger, stabilize climate change or whatevs, stop supercell storms and prevent all forest fires. And in exchange? They'll want land. Real estate. Starting with places that nobody wants. Deserts, islands, mountains, glaciers. Uninhabited terrain. Plus inhabited terrain. Air currents. Ocean waves. Whatever they can grab, they’ll grab. And the humans will totally sell it all for fabricator-printed gold, I’m certain."

  "Oh," Galateya blinked, finally comprehending the scope of the problem.

  "Then… Dimensional refugees," Sage stated with a sharper tone. "Billions of them. More than can be safely managed. Prads from all the doomed worlds the Frontenachii collected. The lucky ones who can afford a ticket out. They will pour in. Rich Omnids buying Montana. Prad families moving into the suburbs. We won't be invaded. We'll be hell-a-gentrified en-masse!"

  "Humanity becomes the underclass," I murmured. "Tenants on our own planet. Shit.”

  “Yep, yep,” the fox agreed. “Thems the beans.”

  "Unless we make it... expensive. Culturally expensive,” I pondered. “Or weird. Or something. I don’t know. Going to tell my lieutenants about this, see what they all think.”

  "Use my rig," Sage gestured to the wall of monitors beside us. She dug out a light-up keyboard and thrust it into my hands. “You trust me, yes?”

  “I trust that you’re on my side,” I said.

  "Uh-huh. How are you commanding your legion of doom, my Emperor?"

  "Telegram mostly," I said.

  "Just telegram?” She arched an eyebrow at me.

  "What? It's encrypted," I defended. "And it supports large groups. And stickers."

  Sage chortled. "Log in. I want in."

  "You want to pretend to be me on Telegram?"

  "Yass. I want to expand the fowks network." Sage bobbed. "You have contacts. Resistance leaders. Cells n’ shit. Gibs."

  I typed in my username and password. The chat windows popped up. Thousands of unread messages from the various resistance cells I'd inadvertently started flashed across Sage’s many screens, spreading outwards and being observed by fox eyes.

  “What are you doing with my contacts?” I asked as she grabbed the keyboard from me.

  "I'm sending them a gift."

  "What gift?"

  "I have a memetic virus—I mean, a lovely gift—that needs distributing," she grinned. She opened a folder named 'DO_NOT_OPEN_FOX_INSIDE'. She dragged a file named 'Cute_Fox_Sleepy.scr' into the main broadcast channel.

  I frowned.

  “Relax dawg,” Sage said. “It’s just a desktop version of me.”

  “Which does what?”

  "It links everyone who installs it to mah skulk," she explained, typing rapidly. "If they install this, I can see the Astral through their screens. It turns your mundane hooman resistance into my foxxy skulk network."

  "Soooo. You are infecting the resistance with malware?"

  "Nu. ’M enhancing your ‘resistance’ with soul-ware," she corrected.

  “And that’s not going to expose them all?”

  “Seers and Scruts cannot smell computer files Ashy,” Sage rolled her eyes at me. “Most of them have no idea how local linear tech works. None at all.”

  “But they can see your eyes?”

  “They can vaguely see my eyes floatin’ in the non-linear Astral, not in the physical,” Sage clarified. “The local Aether makes it incredibly difficult to pinpoint magical hot spots, especially ones that keep moving around. People carry phones around. My magical file pins are tiiiiny and wiggly, turn on and off at random, the fox-ness undulating like an ocean wave. Like I said, I've been doing this for a while, learning n’ devvin’ good stuff w’ my Thunderbird bestie from Omnithornia.”

  “Fine.” I sighed.

  She typed the message and hit enter.

  [Emperor of Earth ?_?]: PRIORITY DISTRIBUTION! Get everyone to install this.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  "Done," she dusted her hands.

  A ping sounded as the first lieutenant replied.

  [Napoleon (? ?° ? ?° )?]: What dis? Better not be a virus.

  [Emperor of Earth ?_?]: It’s not.

  Sage replied as me.

  [Emperor of Earth ?_?]: It’s an app developed by a clever fox. It’ll allow us improved communication. Better encryption than telegram. Put it on all your devices, trust the Fox. It’ll install itself as different apps with different, randomly generated names and icons. Tell everyone to keep it running in the background.

  [Napoleon (? ?° ? ?° )?]: mkay. Scanning with antivirus.

  [Napoleon (? ?° ? ?° )?]: Seems clean enuff. Going to install.

  “Can I have the keyboard now?” I asked.

  “Yepperses.” Sage passed me the keyboard.

  [Emperor of Earth ?_?]: Any updates of interest?

  [Napoleon (? ?° ? ?° )?]: Just got an interesting report from a Seattle Cell Watcher C4P4. She is at the Tipsy Sasquatch. She says she met an odd as fuck, festive prad who’s hitting on one of her cell mates. Here's the full report of the bar meet C4P4 just had her LLM voice to speech app record and send our way.”

  I clicked the file. A text summary of Sarah's encounter opened across Sage’s monitors. Our trio quickly read it. Sage got through it first and looked at the screen with a frown.

  [Emperor of Earth ?_?]: make sure C4P4 installs the fox app ASAP and points the front camera of phone under the table directly at this sus festive prad, okay? I'm going to have it take a pic of her to evaluate how dangerous she is.

  Sage typed as me.

  [Napoleon (? ?° ? ?° )?]: on it

  We waited while Napoleon's orders passed down the chain to C4P4.

  In a few minutes a blurry, flickering video of striped G-string panties, a green skirt and long ass prad legs in whimsical mesh-tights appeared on one of Sage's screens.

  Sage's reaction to the view wasn't what I expected at all.

  The Skinwalker froze, tail puffing itself out, eyes igniting from within, pupils exploding wide. “Fuck. Oh fucking fuck… we are so fucked.”

  “What?” Galateya and I looked at the fox filled with heckles to the brim.

  “Shhh!” She waved her hands at us. “I'm figuring it out. Gimme a bit to go up the chain of Astral connections.”

  We fell silent, waiting for the fox to sniff things out.

  “Riiiiight,” Sage finally let out, opening her eyes after about ten minutes. “I thought that there’s another small Stabalist ship out there softly scrying out for me. Wasn’t too sure. They were being… shifty. Whimsical. Gentle. I see. I get it now. They’re not with the Stabalist Omnids at all. Cheeky See-Mass bastards.”

  “What do you see exactly?” Galateya demanded.

  “I see the great Coniferous Conversion,” Sage growled, eyes igniting from within. “A living dungeon superweapon, this kind of shit that erases, devours entire worlds. Her… Apostles are already here, planting the seeds of our devastation. Christ! Who the shit let this… this fucked monstrosity into our dimension?!”

  “Can… can we stop it?” the dragon girl asked.

  “If we move faster than they can plant their festive roots,” Sage growled with sharp fox-chompers, her face rapidly turning into a glistening Skinwalker skull, myriads of glowing, colorful fox eyes igniting over her head like an eerie halo. “Nobody fucks with my planet! NOBODY! Teyya, commer' and gib' me snuggles and let me into your Fractal Engine heart. I’m going to need maximum dragon power to figure out how those bastards are doing it!”

  The dragon climbed over me and slid into the Skinwalker’s embrace. Both of them closed their eyes. Galateya’s mane and scales turned into pure white diamonds casting shifting prismatic rainbows across the attic loft.

  Thousands of fox eyes blossomed across the monitors around us dancing between static flickers.

  Then, a prad dog girl in a 1950s space suit with the gold symbol of hammer and sickle on her chest and red, bold letters С С С Р A on her space helmet emerged from the silver dust spirals.

  November 3, 1957.

  The day she died as Laika.

  The nightmare that haunted her every time she dove too deep into the Astral abyss, the inescapable, awful memory that burned itself into her soul.

  A reflection of her, her worst fear, the truth of who she once was.

  The nightmare always began with the ascent. The R-7 intercontinental ballistic rocket roared toward the heavens with a deafening violence that rattled her teeth and threatened to shatter her skeleton inside the primitive pressure suit, putting unwieldy pressure on her body.

  She endured the G-force because she was a brave girl and the pride of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Archmages. The human mages and pradavarian generals in the heavy gray coats promised her a medal after her safe return, offering her stiff handshakes.

  The roar faded into the silence of the void as the capsule cleared the atmosphere of Earth.

  Weightlessness took hold of her stomach while heat began to crawl up the walls of the metal capsule.

  Things seemed fine, hours of the flight flew by like a blink, then… on the craft's fourth orbit around the planet something went… Wrong.

  The bulky, rubberized canvas of her space suit began to feel like a kiln wrapping around her body.

  "Control," Laika barked into the receiver. "The temperature is rising. The thermal regulation system is non-responsive. Please advise!”

  Static hissed in her headset for a long and agonizing minute.

  "Control," she repeated. Sweat ran into her eyes and stung them. The air inside Sputnik 2 grew thick like she was in a banya. "It is forty degrees inside! Control. Please activate the descent sequence. It is too hot!"

  The radio crackled to life with the hiss-entwined voice of the Mission Commander Vladimir Yazdovsky.

  "Laika," he said. "There is no descent sequence."

  Laika froze in her harness while the metal walls of her vessel began to radiate unforgiving fury. She remembered the faces of the engineers days before the launch. She recalled the frantic pace and the quick safety checks. They whispered about the Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution and how everything had to be ready before the 1957 holiday parade in Moscow.

  Three prad dogs were trained for the Sputnik 2 flight: Albina, Mushka, and her. She thought that she was going to be famous, that she was… That Vladimir Yazdovsky chose her to be the primary flight dog from all the others as she did better than them in the endless centrifuge tests and…

  He introduced her to Sergei Korolev, the greatest Soviet rocket scientist! He even took her to play with his children, promised that he would make her part of his family and…

  He… Vladimir kissed her on the nose and wished her “bon voyage”!

  She thought that he... that he loved her!

  Laika's eyes filled with tears as she panted furiously, struggling to think through the heat and panic.

  She was a stray, a teenage mutt without family, without a syn-pack mate. Vladimir was a human. He found her begging for food on a grimy side street leading to the Moscow ring road construction site and offered her the world, blotting her imagination with promises of acceptance, family and love…

  "What?" she asked incredulously, refusing to believe Vladimir's words. “Repeat that Control.”

  "The landing system failed due to… overheating upon orbital insertion," Vladimir stated with inescapable, brutal finality. "There is no way down. I’m sorry."

  "But… you promised," Laika uttered, heart hammering in her chest. “You all promised me! You promised me…”

  "You are a hero now, Laika," the scientist’s voice continued dully. "History will remember your sacrifice. A good girl. The best girl. You will be praised by the Motherland. They will sing songs of your glory and make a statue of you in Mos…"

  The connection cut into hissing static.

  Panic detonated in Laika’s chest. The dog girl thrashed against her restraints and clawed at the walls with gloved hands. The space suit, the tiny cabin and the restraints bound her movements and trapped the rising heat against her fur.

  She stared at the thermometer.

  Fifty degrees. Sixty.

  This is why they chose HER, a stray, a mutt.

  To die.

  To die here, a test subject, a patsy to test their rocket. This is why Vladimir picked her from the street that icy winter evening!

  Her skin began to blister under the heavy canvas. The air turned to fire in her lungs. She looked out the small and round porthole expecting to see the cold indifference of the stars.

  She saw eyes there.

  Thousands of colorful eyes hanging in the black abyss.