“What a genius idea!”
“Even I, Rick, have to give these idiots credit.
They actually came up with something brilliant enough to impress me!”
After Morty found the suitcase-sized Reality Generator aboard the spaceship, he called AI Cthulhu Rick over to take a look at it.
After hearing Morty’s explanation and inspecting the device himself, even AI Cthulhu Rick was stunned by what it could do.
Unlike the Sword of Silence, a weapon specifically made to kill Cthulhu monsters, the Reality Generator was, in a certain sense, absolutely an SSSS-class artifact.
It might not be especially effective against enemies on the physical plane, but against enemies on the mental plane, or even beings without a physical form, it was practically a divine artifact.
“So nobody’s ever used it in actual combat?”
“Who cares?
I’ll stick it on the ship.
Most of the parts in this Space Cruiser came straight from that wreck underground anyway!”
AI Cthulhu Rick got right to work and installed the Reality Generator.
Half an hour later, the two of them were piloting the two-seater spacecraft straight into outer space.
As they broke through the atmosphere and the dazzling stars of the Cthulhu Dimension spread out before them, Morty found himself completely captivated by the beautiful yet dangerous sight.
Unlike Morty’s own world, space in this dimension was filled with battlefields left behind by clashes between the three major Cthulhu factions.
Those battles might erupt every few thousand years, every ten thousand years, or sometimes only once every few hundred million years.
Either way, the entire expanse of space was littered with the scars they had left behind.
Yet after thousands of years at minimum, those once-ugly battlefields had been transformed by time into sights of astonishing beauty.
Take the nebula off to the right of Morty’s field of view.
It formed a three-dimensional cone.
From its shape, it wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened.
Some enormous being had been pinned against a planet by an opponent with terrifying strength and beaten mercilessly…
In the end, the entire planet had been smashed to pieces, its debris blasted into a cone stretching across dozens of light-years.
The sharp, jagged edges of those shattered fragments had long since been worn smooth by time.
Now they hung in the sea of stars like a neon sign mounted on the body of some colossal reinforced-concrete city beast.
“It’s fucking beautiful…”
“This fucking sucks…”
The old man and the boy sighed at the same time.
Then Morty saw AI Cthulhu Rick pull a bottle of liquor out of nowhere, tip his head back, and start chugging.
Morty had already had more than enough of Rick’s habit of drunk driving through space.
He immediately reached over and slapped the bottle out of AI Cthulhu Rick’s hand.
“What the hell!
What’s wrong with having a drink?
Don’t you think you’re being a little too damn controlling?”
AI Cthulhu Rick glared at Morty and shouted.
Morty’s face darkened as he told him that once this whole thing was over, he could go drink wherever the hell he wanted.
Rick’s drunk driving in space had already left him traumatized.
Last time, their spaceship had nearly punched a massive hole straight through a Galactic Federation warship.
So if AI Cthulhu Rick planned on flying drunk, then forget Xoth.
They could just head straight for Cthulhu instead.
That’d save them some trouble.
Morty had dragged Cthulhu out to scare him again.
AI Cthulhu Rick was pissed, but he had no choice except to suck it up.
He didn’t have a portal gun.
Otherwise, he would’ve escaped the Cthulhu Dimension a long time ago.
Fine.
Just wait until this whole mess with Cthylla was over.
Then he’d show Morty what going big really looked like.
…
While the two headed toward Xoth, Cthulhu’s homeworld, Cthulhu Rick returned home only to discover, to his irritation, that his place had once again been surrounded by a swarm of Gromflomites.
As everyone knew, the Galactic Federation’s influence wasn’t limited to Dimension C-137.
Otherwise, there’d be no way to explain why Gromflomites had been stationed at Interdimensional Customs the first time Rick went there in the show, or why, after he screwed up and fled to another world for the first time, Galactic Federation Gromflomites still showed up in a completely different universe.
Gromflomites were fucking ridiculous.
But Cthulhu Rick would still be delighted to see every last one of them wiped out.
After all, a bunch of six-foot-tall Gromflomites hadn’t built the Galactic Federation by topping up their phone credit.
Gromflomites were neither viviparous nor oviparous, and their absurd reproductive rate had managed to leave even AI cloning technology in the dust.
That was exactly why they were practically impossible to wipe out.
In an unmodified Gromflomite family, a single couple could reproduce twice a year, producing three thousand children each time.
It only took three months for a larva to reach adulthood.
And thanks to genetic modification, their lifespan had been extended to eighty years.
So Ricks from practically every world, Cthulhu Rick included, absolutely despised this ugly, ridiculously overpopulated species.
Now that a whole group of Gromflomites had shown up at his door, Cthulhu Rick had no intention of talking things out.
He was ready to start killing.
But before he could, one of them stepped forward and explained that they weren’t here for him.
They were looking for C137.
Cthulhu Rick already had everything ready.
He was seconds away from calling over seven or eight Elder Gods and having the entire group reduced to ash.
But when he heard they were after C137, he stopped.
He could obviously win the fight.
The problem was that Gromflomites acted exactly like actual flies.
Kill one group, and the rest would annoy the living shit out of him afterward.
So if they wanted that Rick from C137, why the hell weren’t they sending diplomatic documents to the Citadel?
What did any of that have to do with him?
“You’re a Rick.
Don’t you know the Citadel has always been hiding somewhere we can’t find?”
“Even if we managed to deliver diplomatic documents to them, they still wouldn’t hand over C137.”
“So you came to me because you think I can help you?” Cthulhu Rick asked with a cold laugh.
The Gromflomite leading the group was a Ninth-Rank Sergeant.
Both his rank and his title meant that only a single opportunity stood between him and the Galactic Federation’s ruling class.
That was why he spoke with complete seriousness and sincerity.
“You Ricks are a major headache for the Galactic Federation, but we have countless other major problems to deal with.
You don’t seriously think the Galactic Federation spends all its time specifically targeting you, do you?”
“When your portal guns run out of energy and you use one of our portals, do we ever seriously investigate your identities?”
“And that brings me to why we’re here.”
“C137 has gone too far.
He and his friends occupy five of the top ten spots on our most-wanted list, and twenty-five of the top fifty.”
“These so-called Freedom Fighters keep challenging the order that holds everything together.
I also know you have ties to the Shadow Council.”
“So the reason I came here is to ask you to pass a proposal on to the Shadow Council.”
“Hand over C137, and we can work together!”
Cthulhu Rick was nothing more than an outsider, yet just because he knew Rick, he’d somehow been shoved right into the middle of the first contact between two major factions.
At that moment, he had about a million different ways he wanted to tell Rick to go fuck himself.
He really must’ve been blind back then to go out of his way to save that old bastard’s life.
And this was what he’d gotten for it.
Now the Galactic Federation had shown up at his door to check the water meter, and they’d even brought the fucking bill with them.
There was absolutely fuck-all he could say.