Roll 4 Fiction Ep. 9: Necessarium ad Exodum

The Don of Neptune just obliterated the Earth, and with it, her last chance of achieving her dream. But becoming a villain doesn't happen all at once: it starts with a single step.

Jun 11, 2025

Introduction

Roll 4 Fiction are stories written by me based on prompts rolled on random dice tables, something common in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. I make 6 dice rolls to randomly determine Character, Conflict Type, Setting, Genres, Theme, and a Wild Magic Twist.

Here's what I rolled for this particular story:

Character — Villain
Conflict — Character Vs. Technology
Setting — Impossible
Genres — Gangster, Sci-Fi
Theme — Good vs. Evil
Wild Magic — Write in Reverse
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Necessarium ad Exodum

In the end, there was Earth.

Zephyr drifted alone through the stillness of space, its dark tendrilled embrace the only comfort she had left. She ignored the holo-request from the Earth’s World Don as the kinetic bombardment encroached on the planet. It was better if she ended things quickly; there was no point in feigned negotiations. She would bombard the planet with enough iron to crack its planetary shield, then drain the atmosphere of oxygen until its people suffocated. The opposite of what she had done to Venus.

The holo-request turned into a wide-channel broadcast. Zephyr ignored that, too. She didn’t need to hear the Ea-Don’s screams for armistice or mercy. Soon, the bombs would strike the shield just outside of the debris field. A few of them would likely make landfall once the shield cracked, but that would take days. She would slow the bombardment down by then to avoid damaging the planet itself.

Except the bombs didn’t slow when they entered the debris field. They didn’t bounce against the planetary shield, and nothing stopped them from breaking through the atmosphere in a deluge of raining fire.

Fear broke through Zephyr’s resolve, and panic finally directed her to open her communications device to the Ea-Don’s wide broadcast.

“—can take the one thing you want most, you tyrannical bi—”

The bombs hit the undefended Earth.

Concentrated kinetic fire shook, then cracked the planet. Volcanos roared to life across its surface, and the atmosphere flashed into a glowing orb of fire as the earth split apart.

Then the Earth shattered. One whole became innumerable pieces, and the fractured planet’s splitting gravity dispersed what little remained of its atmosphere into the void. The molten core devoured the thin crust, and space super-cooled the undulating masses of liquid metal.

Zephyr would have crumbled to her knees if the stillness of space allowed it. After everything she’d done—everything she’d gained—the Ea-Don had taken away the final piece she needed by sacrificing his entire planet. Her noble purpose had been destroyed by an act of ultimate evil.

The Ea-Don had doomed humanity.

56 days before Earth, there had been Venus.

The Ve-Don hadn’t opened her planetary forcefield. She had refused to connect with Zephyr’s coms device, and she couldn’t blame her. There wasn’t a point in negotiating when Zephyr held all the cards. All the Ve-Don could do was think to deny her Venus’s resources by closing off the entire planet, which Zephyr had anticipated. It’s why she had gone to Mercury first.

Zephyr only needed Venus’s carbon dioxide. So, using the rods of iron in her first kinetic bombardment, she punctured the forcefield at a single point, flooded the planet with oxygen, then set the atmosphere on fire. Everyone on the planet was burned alive, and in the end, there had been even more carbon dioxide than before.

A net-gain.

127 days before Earth, there had been Mercury.

The Cry-Don had fled into his underground labyrinth rather than face Zephyr. He connected to her coms request just once to tell her that her bombs wouldn’t reach him or his people inside the planet’s world-spanning underground labyrinth. He had been right: the iron Zephyr was there for built natural structures of unrivaled strength, and she couldn’t destroy them without destroying the one thing she needed from Mercury.

So instead, she collapsed each of the entrances to the labyrinth using what few atomics she had left. She took the iron mines for herself—she would need them for Venus—and the Cry-Don and his people starved under the ground while Zephyr got what she needed.

297 days before Earth, there had been Mars.

Zephyr had learned how to gain control of Mercury’s mines from her experience waging war with the Mar-Don. He had chosen to negotiate via holo; thinking he had the upper hand when it came to armaments. When those negotiations soured, he had decided to wage war against her from his city on Olympus Mons.

She had wasted nearly a hundred days trying to push into the city from orbit before she ordered the release of her hydrogen bombs. Mars’s orbital defenses had been good, but far from the best. In the end, when the bombs finally touched down, the city on top of the system’s largest mountain disappeared beneath the eruption of the system’s largest volcano, and the Mar-Don’s silicon mines were hers.

563 days before Earth, there had been Jupiter and Saturn.

The last time Zephyr touched down on a planet had been Jupiter. The Jup-Don and Sat-Don had agreed to meet her in The Palace, a floating restaurant inside of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Their conversation had been tense, and in the end, they felt the two of them, already united, could do without Zephyr’s plans. They felt the helium- and hydrogen-rich atmospheres of their planets were too valuable for Zephyr to risk attacking directly. They had been right.

So, when their conversation had ended, Zephyr had ordered the building’s thrusters destroyed. She had rushed to the last escape ship she had allowed to remain on the building, and watched as the restaurant—and what remained of the Jovian Dons—fell screaming into the crushing Jupiter atmosphere.

The planets’ hydrogen and helium mines were hers.

And 1,682 days before Earth, there had been Uranus.

The perpetual ice storms of Uranus raged outside of the Ur-Don’s office, the sky’s pale blue combating the burning yellow of the interior lights. The Ur-Don swirled then sipped the water in his glass. He smacked his lips as though tasting the notes of fine wine. Zephyr’s own glass sat on the table untouched, collecting condensation while her hands were busy fiddling with the hidden gun in her lap.

“You’re insane,” the Ur-Don finally said. “It’ll never work.”

“Not alone,” Zephyr said. “One World Don couldn’t hope to do it. That’s why I need your help.”

“Do you realize how much you’re asking for? Did you ever stop to think there was a reason we stopped with Neptune? What you’re suggesting would bankrupt the entire system—and it wouldn’t even be guaranteed to work. Not that we’d know if it did.”

“Earth’s discovered warp,” Zephyr said.

The Ur-Don stopped swirling his glass.

“How could you possibly know that?” he asked.

“Because I keep tabs like the rest of you—though it spreads me considerably thinner to do so. I know they’ve discovered warp.”

“Theoretical warp.”

“By the time we unite and pool together the necessary resources, it won’t be theoretical anymore,” Zephyr assured him. “The problem is that it runs hot. Really hot, but we—” Zephyr gestured between herself and the Ur-Don. “—can mine enough water from our atmospheres in the next ten years to cool a thousand warp drives.”

“Theoretical warp drives,” the Ur-Don clarified.

“We can get plenty of fuel from Jupiter and Saturn, silicon for processors from Mars, and iron and carbon from Mercury and Venus to create more than enough steel. I’m telling you, Bellin, we can do it. We should do it. Humanity isn’t meant to sit stagnant in Sol System. We’re destined to leave—it isn’t a question of if, it’s a question of when. But if we work together now, we might actually be able to leave this system in our lifetimes!”

The Ur-Don set his empty glass on the table.

“It’s a wonderful dream, Zephyr,” the Ur-Don said. “But it’s just a dream. No Don is going to agree to share their resources in some philanthropic ideal like ‘chasing humanity’s destiny’ when we already rule our little kingdoms.”

“But we could become Dons of entire systems!”

“Why? I don’t know about you, but Uranus is plenty enough work for me as it is. Besides, Regis will never agree to it. The Ea-Don wouldn’t give anyone the plans to build a coffee maker, much less a warp drive.”

The Ur-Don took Zephyr’s glass off the table and took a sip. Zephyr struggled to keep her sweaty grip on the gun.

“I’m not giving you my water, Zephyr,” the Ur-Don said. “Not for free. And unless I’m mistaken, Neptune doesn’t have anything to offer me that I can’t already find here.” The Ur-Don splayed his hands in a placating gesture, swirling the water in his glass. “I’m sorry, Zephyr, but I’m just not interested in altruistic donations.”

“Neither am I.”

Zephyr pulled the trigger, and the bullet punched into the Ur-Don’s chest, sending him staggering backward. His back hit the wall, and he looked down, then back up at her with a look of betrayal before slowly collapsing to the floor.

“If you won’t share your world’s resources,” Zephyr said, “then I’ll take them for myself. It’s what we Dons are good at, after all. I’m taking humanity past this system, Bellin. It’s what I was meant to do.”

Zephyr turned back to watch the Ur-Don give his final breath, a small trail of blood betraying the end of his pitiful crawl across the floor.

“And no one’s going to stop me.”

About the Story

The most challenging aspect of this story was certainly the wild magic twist of “writing it in reverse.” First, I had to figure out what that actually meant (just because I wrote it down as a prompt doesn’t mean I gave it any thought beforehand). It could mean starting the story from what I would think as a “final draft”, then working my way backward through a rough draft, outline, and finally brainstorm; but that felt like more of a writer’s exercise than something that would actually produce a short story.

So instead, I opted to start the story from the climax, then work backward to the inciting incident.

Full disclosure, this actually isn’t the first time I’ve written a story like this. My second unpublished novel had a similar (though very, very different) plot structure in which one of the main characters experiences the events of the story backwards. I learned through that novel that one way to keep readers engaged with a character whose destiny is already known is to show their character evolution—or, in the case of this story, de-evolution.

Zephyr begins the story as the villain—literally destroying Earth without offering any negotiation or quarter—and it costs her her dream and the whole reason she started herself on this path. As the story progresses (reverses?), we see how at each planet, her conquering becomes less and less impersonal: obliterating Earth → burning Venus’s atmosphere → killing Mercury’s population → destroying Mars’s capital city → destroying a single building → killing a single person.

The goal is to see in a reverse order how someone who is willing to make evil/immoral decisions to justify the pursuit of their goals will make progressively more disastrous decisions until they literally destroy the thing they justified starting on that path of destruction for.

We also get to have the plans for Zephyr revealed in reverse. We know at the beginning she destroys Earth and, in turn, destroys her hope of fulfilling her goal, but we don’t know until the very end during her conversation with the Don of Uranus what that goal was or why destroying Earth made it impossible to achieve.

Wow, that’s a lot of yapping, huh? Let’s quickly talk about the rest of the prompt integrations and give this short story a score, shall we?

The Gangster and Sci-Fi prompts ended up working really well together. The Gangster genre is about rising to power within a society, often through immoral means, while the Sci-Fi genre is about postulating an ideal society and discovering our place as individuals inside of that society. Mixing the two, I could give an immoral character (the Villain from the prompts) a moral goal centered around how society should progress.

This also fed well into the Good vs. Evil thematic core, which turned into the theme: Good outcomes cannot be the result of Evil deeds. Putting a character used to performing immoral (evil) deeds to try and achieve a good result was very compelling to me, and the Sci-Fi aspect of the story also fed well into tying the conflict into technology—in this case, fighting to obtain technology.

But then, I was left with the “Impossible” setting. When I put down that prompt, my idea was that it would be in a place that was literally impossible. Think the end of Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey is inside of a black hole and messing with space-time.

However, I couldn’t quite get a setting that felt “impossible” enough. I opted to put Zephyr floating alone in space, but that’s definitely not “impossible.” Hazardous, sure, but not impossible. I thought about putting her inside of a single second, or (now that I’m writing this section) maybe inside of a warp-drive wormhole would’ve worked. Ultimately, though, I made my choice of setting, and while I think it’s close, it is not quite there.

In the end, I really loved this story, despite its challenges, and I’m going to give it a 9.2/10.

Did you enjoy the story? Did you feel like any of the prompts fell flat, or were confusing? What kind of ideas pop into your head when you think of an “impossible” setting? I would love to know your thoughts!

Copyright Stuff

This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Quain Holtey

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